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Unconscious Memory 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
In 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/unconsciousmemorOObutl_0 


Unconscious Memory 
With an Introduction by 
Professor Hartog 
by | 
Samuel Butler 


New York 


FE, P. Dutton & Company 
681 Fifth Avenue 


Made and printed in 
Great Britain 


Dbhis/ Book 


Is inscribed to 


RicHARD GarneTT, Esa. 
(Of the British Museum) 
In grateful acknowledgment of the unwearying kindness 
with which he has so often placed at my disposal 


his varied store of information. 


“‘As this paper contains nothing which deserves the name either of experi- 
ment or discovery, and as it is, in fact, destitute of every species of merit, we 
should have allowed it to pass among the multitude of those articles which 
must always find their way into the collections of a society which is pledged 
to publish two or three volumes every year. . . . We wish to raise our feeble 
voice against innovations, that can have no other effect than to check the 
progress of science, and renew all those wild phantoms of the imagination 
which Bacon and Newton put to flight from her temple. ”— Opening Paragraph 
of a Review of Dr, Young’s Bakerian Lecture, Edinburgh Review, January 


1803, p. 450. 


*““Young’s work was laid before the Royal Society, and was made the 1801 
Bakerian Lecture. But he was before his time. ‘The second number of the 
Edinburgh Review contained an article levelled against him by Henry (after- 
wards Lord) Brougham, and this was so severe an attack that Young’s ideas 
were absolutely quenched for fifteen years. Brougham was then only twenty- 
four years of age, Young’s theory was reproduced in France by Fresnel. In 
our days it is the accepted theory, and is found to explain all the phenomena of 
light,” — Times Report of a Lecture by Professor Tyndall on Light, April 27, 1880, 


Contents 


NoTE. By R.A. Streatfeild 


INTRODUCTION AND POSTSCRIPT. By Professor Marcus 
Hartog : : : ; J 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


CHAPTER I. Introduction—General ignorance on the sub- 
ject of evolution at the time the “Origin of Species” 
was published in 1859 . ; : 


CHAPTER II. How I came to write “ Life and Habit,” and 
the circumstances of its completion ‘ , 


CHAPTER III. How I came to write “ Evolution, Old and 
New ”—Mr. Darwin’s “brief but imperfect” sketch of 
the opinions of the writers on evolution who had pre- 
ceded him—The reception which “ Evolution, Old and 
New” met with : : : , ; 


CHAPTER IV. The manner in which Mr. Darwin met 
“ Evolution, Old and New” : : : 


CHAPTER V. Introduction to Professor Hering’s Lecture. 
CHAPTER VI. Professor Ewald Hering “On Memory” 


CHAPTER VII. Introduction to a translation of the chap- 
ter upon instinct in Von Hartmann’s “ Philosophy of 
the Unconscious” ; : : 


CHAPTER VIII. Translation of the chapter on “The 
Unconscious in Instinct,” from Von Hartmann’s “ Philo- 
sophy of the Unconscious” 


CHAPTER IX. Remarks upon Von Hartmann’s position in 
regard to instinct j : : ' ; 


CHAPTER X. Recapitulation and statement of an objection 
CHAPTER XI. On Cycles 


CHAPTER XII. Refutation— Memory at once a promoter 
and a disturber of uniformity of action and structure 


CHAPTER XIII. Conclusion 


vil 


26 


38 
52 
63 


87 


92 


137 
146 
156 


161 


173 





Note to Second Edition 


| Pap many years a link in the chain of Samuel Butler’s bio- 
logical works has been missing. ‘‘ Unconscious Memory ” 
was originally published thirty years ago, but for fully half 
that period it has been out of print, owing to the destruction 
of a large number of the unbound sheets in a fire at the 
premises of the printers some years ago. The present 
reprint comes, I think, at a peculiarly fortunate moment, 
since the attention of the general public has of late been 
drawn to Butler’s biological theories in a marked manner by 
several distinguished men of science, notably by Dr. Francis 
Darwin, who, in his presidential address to the British Associa- 
tion in 1908, quoted from the translation of Hering’s address 
on ‘‘ Memory as a Universal Function of Original Matter,”’ 
which Butler incorporated into ‘‘ Unconscious Memory,’’ and 
spoke in the highest terms of Butler himself. It is not neces- 
sary for me to do more than refer to the changed attitude of 
scientific authorities with regard to Butler and his theories, 
since Professor Marcus Hartog has most kindly consented 
to contribute an introduction to the present edition of 
“Unconscious Memory,’’ summarising Butler’s views upon 
biology, and defining his position in the world of science. A 
word must be said as to the controversy between Butler and 
Darwin, with which Chapter IV is concerned. I have been 
told that in reissuing the book at all I am committing a 
grievous error of taste, that the world is no longer interested 
in these “old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago,” 
and that Butler himself, by refraining from republishing 
“ Unconscious Memory,”’ tacitly admitted that he wished the 
controversy to be consigned to oblivion. This last suggestion, 
at any rate, has no foundation in fact. Butler desired nothing 
less than that his vindication of himself against what he 
considered unfair treatment should be forgotten. He would 
have republished ‘‘ Unconscious Memory ’’ himself, had not 
the latter years of his life been devoted to all-engrossing 
work in other fields. In issuing the present edition | am 
fulfilling a wish that he expressed to me shortly before his 


death, R. A. STREATFEILD. 
A pril, 1910. 





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Introduction 
By Marcus Hartog, M.A, D.Sc, F.L.S., F.R.HS. 


N reviewing Samuel Butler’s works, ‘‘ Unconscious 
Memory ” gives us an invaluable lead ; for it tells us 
(Chaps. II, III) how the author came to write the Book of 
the Machines in ‘‘ Erewhon ”’ (1872), with its foreshadow- 
ing of the later theory, “‘ Life and Habit ”’ (1878), “ Evolu- 
tion, Old and New” (1879), as well as ‘‘ Unconscious 
Memory ”’ (1880) itself. His fourth book on biological 
theory was “‘ Luck, or Cunning ? ”’ (1887).? 

Besides these books, his contributions to biology comprise 
several essays: ‘‘ Remarks on Romanes’ Mental Evo- 
lution in Animals,” contained in ‘‘ Selections from Previous 
Works” (1884) incorporated into ‘‘ Luck, or Cunning?” ; 
“The Deadlock in Darwinism” (Universal Review, 
April-June, 1890), republished in the posthumous volume 
of “Essays on Life, Art, and Science’ (1904) ; and, finally, 
some of the ‘‘ Extracts from the Notebooks of the late 
Samuel Butler,” edited by Mr. H. Festing Jones, now in 
course of publication in the New Quarterly Review. 


Of all these, ‘‘ LIFE AND HABIT ” (1878) is the most 
important, the main building to which the other writings 
are buttresses or, at most, annexes. Its teaching has been 
summarised in “ Unconscious Memory” in four main 
principles : ‘‘ (1) the oneness of personality between parent 
and offspring ; (2) memory on the part of the offspring of 
certain actions which it did when in the persons of its 

1 This is the date on the title-page. The preface is dated 
October 15, 1886, and the first copy was issued in November of the 
same year. All the dates are taken from the Bibliography by Mr. 


H. Festing Jones prefixed to the “‘ Extracts’ in the New Quarterly 
Review (1909). 


xi 


X1l Unconscious Memory 


forefathers ; (3) the latency of that memory until it is re- 
kindled by a recurrence of the associated ideas ; (4) the 
unconsciousness with which habitual actions come to be 
performed.” To these we must add a fifth : the purposive- 
ness of the actions of living beings, as of the machines 
which they make or select. 

Butler tells (‘‘ Life and Habit,” p. 33) that he some- 
times hoped “that this book would be regarded as a 
valuable adjunct to Darwinism.” He was bitterly dis- 
appointed in the event, for the book, as a whole, was 
received by professional biologists as a gigantic joke— 
a joke, moreover, not in the best possible taste. True, its 
central ideas, largely those of Lamarck, had been pre- 
sented by Hering in 1870 (as Butler found shortly after 
his publication); they had been favourably received, 
developed by Haeckel, expounded and praised by Ray 
Lankester. Coming from Butler, they met with con- 
tumely, even from such men as Romanes, who, as Butler 
had no difficulty in proving, were unconsciously inspired 
by the same ideas—Nur mit ein bischen ander’n Worter. 

It is easy, looking back, to see why “ Life and Habit ” 
so missed its mark. Charles Darwin’s presentation of the 
evolution theory had, for the first time, rendered it possible 
for a “sound naturalist’ to accept the doctrine of common 
descent with divergence; and so given a real mean- 
ing to the term “ natural relationship,” which had forced 
itself upon the older naturalists, despite their belief in 
special and independent creations. The immediate aim 
of the naturalists of the day was now to fill up the gaps 
in their knowledge, so as to strengthen the fabric of a 
unified biology. For this purpose they found their actual 
scientific equipment so inadequate that they were fully 
occupied in inventing fresh technique, and working there- 
with at facts—save a few critics, such as St. George Mivart, 
who was regarded as negligible, since he evidently held a 
brief for a party standing outside the scientific world. 

Butler introduced himself as what we now call ‘“ The 


Introduction Xili 


Man in the Street,”’ far too bare of scientific clothing to 
satisfy the Mrs. Grundy of the domain: lacking all recog- 
nised tools of science and all sense of the difficulties in his 
way, he proceeded to tackle the problems of science with 
little save the deft pen of the literary expert in his hand. 
His very failure to appreciate the difficulties gave greater 
power to his work—much as Tartarin of Tarascon ascended 
the Jungfrau and faced successfully all dangers of Alpine 
travel, so long as he believed them to be the mere “ blagues 
de réclame ” of the wily Swiss host. His brilliant qualities 
of style and irony themselves told heavily against him. 
Was he not already known for having written the most 
trenchant satire that had appeared since “ Gulliver's 
Travels’? ? Had he not sneered therein at the very foun- 
dations of society, and followed up its success by a pseudo- 
biography that had taken in the “ Record ” and the 
“Rock”? In “ Life and Habit,” at the very start, he 
goes out of his way to heap scorn at the respected names 
of Marcus Aurelius, Lord Bacon, Goethe, Arnold of Rugby, 
and Dr. W. B. Carpenter. He expressed the lowest opinion 
of the Fellows of the Royal Society. To him the pro- 
fessional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge 
for his ideal and aim, was a medicine-man, priest, augur— 
useful, perhaps, in his way, but to be carefully watched 
by all who value freedom of thought and person, lest with 
opportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst 
type. Not content with blackguarding the audience to 
whom his work should most appeal, he went on to depre- 
ciate that work itself and its author in his finest vein of 
irony. Having argued that our best and highest know- 
ledge is that of whose possession we are most ignorant, 
he proceeds: “‘ Above all, let no unwary reader do me 
the injustice of believing in me. In that I write at all 
I am among the damned.” 


His writing of ““EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW es 
(1879) was due to his conviction that scant justice had 


X1V Unconscious Memory 


been done by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace and their 
admirers to the pioneering work of Buffon, Erasmus 
Darwin, and Lamarck. To repair this he gives a brilliant 
exposition of what seemed to him the most valuable portion 
of their teachings on evolution. His analysis of Buffon’s 
true meaning, veiled by the reticences due to the conditions 
under which he wrote, is as masterly as the English in 
which he develops it. His sense of wounded justice ex- 
plains the vigorous polemic which here, as in all his later 
writings, he carries to the extreme. 

As a matter of fact, he never realised Charles Darwin’s 
utter lack of sympathetic understanding of the work of 
his French precursors, let alone his own grandfather, 
Erasmus. Yet this practical ignorance, which to Butler 
was so strange as to transcend belief, was altogether 
genuine, and easy to realise when we recall the position 
of Natural Science in the early thirties in Darwin’s student 
days at Cambridge, and for a decade or two later. Catas- 
tropharianism was the tenet of the day: to the last it 
commended itself to his Professors of Botany and Geology, 
for whom Darwin held the fervent allegiance of the Indian 
scholar, or chela, to his guru. As Geikie has recently 
pointed out, it was only later, when Lyell had shown that 
the breaks in the succession of the rocks were only partial 
and local, without involving the universal catastrophes 
that destroyed all life and rendered fresh creations thereof 
necessary, that any general acceptance of a descent theory 
could be expected. We may be very sure that Darwin 
must have received many solemn warnings against the 
dangerous speculations of the ‘‘ French Revolutionary 
School.” He himself was far too busy at the time with 
the reception and assimilation of new facts to be awake 
to the deeper interest of far-reaching theories. 

It is the more unfortunate that Butler’s lack of appre- 
ciation on these points should have led to the enormous 
proportion of bitter personal controversy that we find in 
the remainder of his biological writings. Possibly, as 


Introduction XV 


suggested by George Bernard Shaw, his acquaintance and 
admirer, he was also swayed by philosophical resent- 
ment at that banishment of mind from the organic uni- 
verse, which was generally thought to have been achieved 
by Charles Darwin’s theory. Still, we must remember 
that this mindless view is not implicit in Charles Darwin’s 
presentment of his own theory, nor was it accepted by 
him as it has been by so many of his professed disciples, 


“UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY” (1880).—We have already 
alluded to an anticipation of Butler’s main theses. In 
1870 Dr. Ewald Hering, one of the most eminent phy- 
siologists of the day, Professor at Vienna, gave an 
Inaugural Address to the Imperial Royal Academy of 
Sciences: ‘‘ Das Gedachtniss als allgemeine Funktion 
der organisirten Materie” (“Memory as a Universal 
Function of Organised Matter’). When “Life and 
Habit ’’ was well advanced, Francis Darwin, at the time 
a frequent visitor, called Butler’s attention to this essay, 
which he himself only knew from an article in “ Nature.” 
Herein Professor E. Ray Lankester had referred to it with 
admiring sympathy in connection with its further develop- 
ment by Haeckel in a pamphlet entitled ‘‘ Die Perigenesis 
der Plastidule.”’ We may note, however, that in his 
collected Essays, “‘ The Advancement of Science ”’ (1890), 
Sir Ray Lankester, while including this Essay, inserts on 
the blank page!—we had almost written ‘“‘the white 
sheet ’’—at the back of it an apology for having ever 
advocated the possibility of the transmission of acquired 
characters. 

‘“‘ Unconscious Memory ”’ was largely written to show the 
relation of Butler’s views to Hering’s, and contains an ex- 
quisitely written translation of the Address. Hering does, 
indeed, anticipate Butler, and that in language far more 
suitable to the persuasion of the scientific public. It con- 
tains a subsidiary hypothesis that memory has for its 


1 i.e. after p. 285 : it bears no number of its own ! 


XVI Unconscious Memory 


mechanism special vibrations of the protoplasm, and the 
acquired capacity to respond to such vibrations once felt 
upon their repetition. I do not think that the theory 
gains anything by the introduction of this even as a mere 
formal hypothesis ; and there is no evidence for its being 
anything more. Butler, however, gives it a warm, nay, 
enthusiastic, reception in Chapter V (Introduction to 
Professor Hering’s lecture), and in his notes to the transla- 
tion of the Address, which bulks so large in this book, but 
points out that he was “‘ not committed to this hypothesis, 
though inclined to accept it on a prima facie view.”’ Later 
on, as we shall see, he attached more importance to it. 

The Hering Address is followed in ‘‘ Unconscious 
Memory ”’ by translations of selected passages from Von 
Hartmann’s ‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” and anno- 
tations to explain the difference from this personification 
of “ The Unconscious” as a mighty all-ruling, all-creating 
personality, and his own scientific recognition of the great 
part played by unconscious processes in the region of mind 
and memory. 

These are the essentials of the book as a contribution: 
to biological philosophy. The closing chapters contain a 
lucid statement of objections to his theory as they might 
be put by a rigid necessitarian, and a refutation of that 
interpretation as applied to human action. 

But in the second chapter Butler states his recession from 
the strong logical position he had hitherto developed in 
his writings from ‘‘ Erewhon ”’ onwards ; so far he had not 
only distinguished the living from the non-living, but dis- 
tinguished among the latter machines or tools from things at 
large.* Machines or tools are the external organs of living 
beings, as organs are their internal machines: they are 

+ The distinction was merely implicit in his published writings, 
but has been printed since his death from his ‘‘ Notebooks,’ New 
Quarterly Review, April, 1908. I had developed this thesis, with- 
out knowing of Butler’s explicit anticipation in an article then 


in“ the press: ‘Mechanism and Life,’ Contemporary Review, 
May, 1908, 


Introduction XVI 


fashioned, assembled, or selected by the beings for a pur- 
pose, so they have a future purpose, as well as a past 
history. ‘‘ Things at large”’ have a past history, but no 
purpose (so long as some being does not convert them 
into tools and give them a purpose): Machines have a 
Why ? as well as a How?: “things at large’ have a 
How ? only. 

In ‘‘ Unconscious Memory ”’ the allurements of unitary 
or monistic views have gained the upper hand, and Butler 
writes (p. 15 post) :— 

The only thing of which I am sure is, that the distinction 
between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is 
more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more 
acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, 
and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association 
or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and 
smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, what we call 
the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain point 
living, and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, 
volition, and power of concerted action. J? 7s only of late, 
however, that I have come to this opinion. 


I have italicised the last sentence, to show that Butler 
was more or less conscious of its irreconcilability with 
much of his most characteristic doctrine. Again, in the 
closing chapter, Butler writes (p. 177 post) :— 

We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as 
living in respect of the qualities it has in common with the 


organic, rather than the organic as non-living in respect of 
the qualities it has in common with the inorganic. 


We conclude our survey of this book by mentioning the 
literary controversial part chiefly to be found in Chapter IV, 
but cropping up elsewhere. It refers to interpolations 
made in the authorised translation of Krause’s “ Life of 
Erasmus Darwin.” Only one side is presented ; and we 
are not called upon, here or elsewhere, to discuss the 
merits of the question. 


“ LUCK, OR,CUNNING ? as the Main Means of Organic 
b 


XVI Unconscious Memory 


Modification ? an Attempt to throw Additional Light 
upon the late Mr. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural 
Selection ”’ (1887), completes the series of biological books. 
This is mainly a book of strenuous polemic. It brings out 
still more forcibly the Hering-Butler doctrine of continued 
personality from generation to generation, and of the 
working of unconscious memory throughout ; and points 
out that, while this is implicit in much of the teaching of 
Herbert Spencer, Romanes, and others, it was nowhere— 
even after the appearance of “‘ Life and Habit ’’—explicitly 
recognised by them, but, on the contrary, masked by in- 
consistent statements and teaching. Not Luck but 
Cunning, not the uninspired weeding out by Natural 
Selection but the intelligent striving of the organism, is 
at the bottom of the useful variety of organic life. And 
the parallel is drawn that not the happy accident of time 
and place, but the Machiavellian cunning of Charles 
Darwin, succeeded in imposing, as entirely his own, on the 
civilised world an uninspired and inadequate theory of evo- 
lution wherein luck played the leading part ; while the more 
inspired and inspiring views of the older evolutionists had 
failed by the inferiority of their luck. On this controversy 
I am bound to say that I do not in the very least share 
Butler’s opinions ; and I must ascribe them to his lack 
of personal familiarity with the biologists of the day and 
their modes of thought and of work. Butler everywhere 
undervalues the important work of elimination played by 
Natural Selection in its widest sense. 

The “‘ Conclusion’ of ‘‘ Luck, or Cunning ?’’ shows a 
strong advance in monistic views, and a yet more marked 
development in the vibration hypothesis of memory given 
by Hering and only adopted with the greatest reserve in 
“Unconscious Memory.”’ 


Our conception, then, concerning the nature of any matter 
depends solely upon its kind and degree of unrest, that is to 
say, on the characteristics of the vibrations that are going on 
within it. The exterior object vibrating in a certain way 


Introduction X1X 


imparts some of its vibrations to our brain; but if the state 
of the thing itself depends upon its vibrations, it [the thing] 
must be considered as to all intents and purposes the vibra- 
tions themselves—plus, of course, the underlying substance 
that is vibrating. . . . The same vibrations, therefore, form 
the substance remembered, introduce an infinitesimal dose of 
it within the brain, modify the substance remembering, and, 
in the course of time, create and further modify the mechanism 
of both the sensory and the motor nerves. Thought and thing 
are one. 

I commend these two last speculations to the reader’s 
charitable consideration, as feeling that I am here travelling 
beyond the ground on which I can safely venture. . . . I believe 
they are both substantially true. (‘‘ Luck, or Cunning ? ”’ 
Ed. 1920, pp. 261-263). 


In 1885 he had written an abstract of these ideas in 
his notebooks (see New Quarterly Review, 1910, p. 116), 
and as in ‘‘ Luck, or Cunning? ”’ associated them vaguely 
with the unitary conceptions introduced into chemistry by 
Newlands and Mendelejeff. Judging himself as an outsider, 
the author of ‘‘ Life and Habit ”’ would certainly have 
considered the mild expression of faith, ‘‘ I believe they 
are both substantially true,’’ equivalent to one of extreme 
doubt. Thus “the fact of the Archbishop’s recognising 
this as among the number of his beliefs is conclusive 
evidence, with those who have devoted attention to the 
laws of thought, that his mind is not yet clear” on 
the matter of the belief avowed (see “ Life and Habit,”’ 
pp. 24, 25). 

To sum up: Butler’s fundamental attitude to the 
vibration hypothesis was all through that taken in 
‘Unconscious Memory ’”’; he played with it as a pretty 
pet, and fancied it more and more as time went on; but 
instead of backing it for all he was worth, like the main 
theses of ‘‘ Life and Habit,” he put a big stake on it— 
and then hedged. 


The last of Butler’s biological writings is the Essay, 
“ THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM,” containing much 


XX Unconscious Memory 


valuable criticism on Wallace and Weismann. It is in allu- 
sion to the misnomer of Wallace’s book, ‘‘ Darwinism,” 
that he introduces the term “ Wallaceism ’’! for a theory 
of descent that excludes the transmission of acquired 
characters. This was, indeed, the chief factor that led 
Charles Darwin to invent his hypothesis of pangenesis, 
which, unacceptable as it has proved, had far more to 
recommend it as a formal hypothesis than the equally 
formal germ-plasm hypothesis of Weismann. 


The chief difficulty in accepting the main theses of 
Butler and Hering is one familiar to every biologist, and 
not at all difficult to understand by the layman. Everyone 
knows that the complicated beings that we term “‘Animals ”’ 
and ‘‘ Plants,’ consist of a number of more or less indi- 
vidualised units, the cells, each analogous to a simpler 
being, a Protist—save in so far as the character of the 
cell unit of the higher being is modified in accordance with 
the part it plays in that complex being as a whole. Most 
people, too, are familiar with the fact that the complex 
being starts as a single cell, separated from its parent ; or, 
where bisexual reproduction occurs, from a cell due to the 
fusion of two cells, each detached from its parent. Such 
cells are called “‘ Germ-cells.’’ The germ-cell, whether of 
single or of dual origin, starts by dividing repeatedly, so 
as to form the primary embryonic cells, a complex mass of 
cells, at first essentially similar, which, however, as they 
go on multiplying, undergo differentiations and migra- 
tions, losing their simplicity as they do so. Those cells 
that are modified to take part in the proper work of the 
whole are called tissue-cells. In virtue of their activities, 
their growth and reproductive power are limited—much 
more in Animals than in Plants, in Higher than in Lower 
beings. It is these tissues, or some of them, that receive 
the impressions from the outside which leave the imprint 


1 The term has recently been revived by Prof. Hubrecht and by 
myself (Contemporary Review, November 1908). 


Introduction XX1 


of memory. Other cells, which may be closely associated 
into a continuous organ, or more or less surrounded by 
tissue-cells, whose part it is to nourish them, are called 
‘ secondary embryonic cells,” or ‘‘ germ-cells.”” The germ- 
cells may be differentiated in the young organism at a 
very early stage, but in Plants they are separated at a 
much later date from the less isolated embryonic regions 
that provide for the Plant’s branching ; in all cases we 
find embryonic and germ-cells screened from the life pro- 
cesses of the complex organism, or taking no very obvious 
part in it, save to form new tissues or new organs, notably 
in Plants. 

Again, in ourselves, and to a greater or less extent in all 
Animals, we find a system of special tissues set apart for 
the reception and storage of impressions from the outer 
world, and for guiding the other organs in their appropriate 
responses—the “‘ Nervous System ”’ ; and when this system 
is ill-developed or out of gear the remaining organs work 
badly from lack of proper skilled guidance and co-ordina- 
tion. How can we, then, speak of ‘“‘ memory ” in a germ- 
cell which has been screened from the experiences of the 
organism, which is too simple in structure to realise them 
if it were exposed to them? My own answer is that we 
cannot form any theory on the subject, the only question 
is whether we have any right to infer this “ memory ” 
from the behaviour of living beings; and Butler, like 
Hering, Haeckel, and some more modern authors, has shown 
that the inference is a very strong presumption. Again, 
it is easy to over-value such complex instruments as we 
possess. The possessor of an up-to-date camera, well 
instructed in the function and manipulation of every part, 
but ignorant of all optics save a hand-to-mouth knowledge 
of the properties of his own lens, might say that a prior 
no picture could be taken with a cigar-box perforated by 
a pin-hole; and our ignorance of the mechanism of the 
psychology of any organism is greater by many times than 
that of my supposed photographer. We know that Plants 


XX11 Unconscious Memory 


are able to do many things that can only be accounted for 
by ascribing to them a “ psyche,” and these co-ordinated 
enough to satisfy their needs; and yet they possess 
no central organ comparable to the brain, no highly 
specialised system for intercommunication like our nerve 
trunks and fibres. As Oscar Hertwig says, we are as 
ignorant of the mechanism of the development of the in- 
dividual as we are of that of hereditary transmission of 
acquired characters, and the absence of such mechanism 
in either case is no-reason for rejecting the proven fact. 

However, the relations of germ and body just described 
led Jager, Nussbaum, Galton, Lankester, and, above all, 
Weismann, to the view that germ-cells or “ stirp”’ 
(Galton) were 7m the body, but not of it. Indeed, in the 
body and out of it, whether as reproductive cells set free, or 
in the developing embryo, they are regarded as forming one 
continuous homogeneity, in contrast to the differentiation 
of the body ; and it is to these cells, regarded as a con- 
tinuum, that the terms stirp, germ-plasm, are especially 
applied. Yet on this view, so eagerly advocated by its 
supporters, we have to substitute for the hypothesis of 
memory, which they declare to have no real meaning here, 
the far more fantastic hypotheses of Weismann: by these 
they explain the process of differentiation in the young 
embryo into new germ and body ; and in the young body 
the differentiation of its cells, each in due time and place, 
into the varied tissue cells and organs. Such views might 
perhaps be acceptable if it could be shown that over each 
cell-division there presided a wise all-guiding genie of trans- 
cending intellect, to which Clerk-Maxwell’s sorting demons 
were mere infants. Yet these views have so enchanted 
many distinguished biologists, that in dealing with the 
subject they have actually ignored the existence of equally 
able workers who hesitate to share the extremest of their 
views. The phenomenon is one well known in hypnotic 
practice. So long as the non-Weismannians deal with 
matters outside this discussion, their existence and their 


Introduction XX1il 


work is rated at its just value ; but any work of theirs on 
this point so affects the orthodox Weismannite (whether 
he accept this label or reject it does not matter), that for 
the time being their existence and the good work they have 
done are alike non-existent. 

Butler founded no school, and wished to found none. 
He desired that what was true in his work should prevail, 
and he looked forward calmly to the time when the recog- 
nition of that truth and of his share in advancing it should 
give him in the lives of others that immortality for which 
alone he craved. 

Lamarckian views have never lacked defenders here 
and in America. Of the English, Herbert Spencer, who 
however, was averse to the vitalistic attitude, Vines 
and Henslow among botanists, Cunningham among 
zoologists, have always resisted Weismannism ; but, I 
think, none of these was distinctly influenced by Hering 
and Butler. In America the majority of the great school 
of paleontologists have been strong Lamarckians, notably 
Cope, who has pointed out, moreover, that the trans- 
formations of energy in living beings are peculiar to 
them. 

We have already adverted to Haeckel’s acceptance and 
development of Hering’s ideas in his ‘“‘ Perigenesis der 
Plastidule.’ Oscar Hertwig has been a consistent La- 
marckian, like Yves Delage of the Sorbonne, and these 
occupy pre-eminent positions not only as observers, but 
as discriminating theorists and historians of the recent 
progress of biology. We may also cite as a Lamarckian— 
of a sort—Felix Le Dantec, the leader of the chemico- 
physical school of the present day. 

But we must seek elsewhere for special attention to the 
points which Butler regarded as the essentials of “‘ Life and 
Habit.” In 1893 Henry P. Orr, Professor of Biology in 


1 See Fortnightly Review, February 1908, and Contemporary 
Review, September and November 1909. Since these publications 
the hypnosis seems to have somewhat weakened. 


XX1V Unconscious Memory 


the University of Louisiana, published a little book entitled 
‘A Theory of Heredity.”” Herein he insists on the ner- 
vous control of the whole body, and on the transmission 
to the reproductive cells of such stimuli, received by the 
body, as will guide them on their path until they shall 
have acquired adequate experience of their own in the 
new body they have formed. I have found the name of 
neither Butler nor Hering, but the treatment is essentially 
on their lines, and is both clear and interesting. 

In 1896 I wrote an essay on ‘‘ The Fundamental Prin- 
ciples of Heredity,’ primarily directed to the man in the 
street. This, after being held over for more than a year by 
one leading review, was ‘‘ declined with regret,’ and again 
after some weeks met the same fate from another editor. 
It appeared in the pages of “‘ Natural Science ” for October, 
1897, and in the “‘ Biologisches Centralblatt ’”’ for the same 
year. I reproduce its closing paragraph :— 


This theory [Hering-Butler’s} has, indeed, a tentative 
character, and lacks symmetrical completeness, but is the 
more welcome as not aiming at the impossible. A whole 
series of phenomena in organic beings are correlated under 
the term of memory, conscious and unconscious, patent and 
latent. . . . Of the order of unconscious memory, latent till 
the arrival of the appropriate stimulus, is all the co-operative 
growth and work of the organism, including its development 
from the reproductive cells. Concerning the modus opevandt 
we know nothing: the phenomena may be due, as Hering 
suggests, to molecular vibrations, which must be at least as 
distinct from ordinary physical disturbances as Roéntgen’s 
rays are from ordinary light; or it may be correlated, as we 
ourselves are inclined to think, with complex chemical changes 
in an intricate but orderly succession. For the present, at 
least, the problem of heredity can only be elucidated by the 
light of mental, and not material processes. 


It will be seen that I express doubts as to the validity 
of Hering’s invocation of molecular vibrations as the 
mechanism of memory, and suggest as an alternative 
rhythmic chemical changes. This view has recently been 


Introduction XXV 


put forth in detail by J. J. Cunningham in his essay on 
the ‘‘ Hormone! Theory of Heredity,” in the Archiv fir 
Entwicklungsmechanik (1909), but I have failed to note 
any direct effect of my essay on the trend of biological 
thought. 

Among post-Darwinian controversies the one that has 
latterly assumed the greatest prominence is that of the 
relative importance of small variations in the way of more 
or less “ fluctuations,”’ and of ‘‘ discontinuous variations,” 
or ‘‘ mutations,’’ as De Vries has called them. Darwin, 
in the first four editions of the ‘‘ Origin of Species, at- 
tached more importance to the latter than in subsequent 
editions ; he was swayed in his attitude, as is well known, 
by an article of the physicist, Fleeming Jenkin, which 
appeared in the North British Review. The mathematics 
of this article were unimpeachable, but they were 
founded on the assumption that exceptional variations 
would only occur in single individuals, which is, indeed, 
often the case among those domesticated races on which 
Darwin especially studied the phenomena of variation. 
Darwin was no mathematician or physicist, and we are 
told in his biography that he regarded every tool-shop rule 
or optician’s thermometer as an instrument of precision : 
so he appears to have regarded Fleeming Jenkin’s demon- 
stration as a mathematical deduction which he was bound 
to accept without criticism. 

Mr. William Bateson, late Professor of Biology in the 
University of Cambridge, as early as 1894 laid great stress 
on the importance of discontinuous variations, collecting 
and collating the known facts in his “ Materials for the 
Study of Variations’; but this important work, now 
become rare and valuable, at the time excited so little 
interest as to be ‘“‘ remaindered ” within a very few years 
after publication. 


1 A “hormone” is a chemical substance which, formed in one 
part of the body, alters the reactions of another part, normally for 
the good of the organism. 


XXVI1 Unconscious Memory 


In 1901 Hugo De Vries, Professor of Botany in the 
University of Amsterdam, published ‘‘ Die Mutations- 
theorie,’’ wherein he showed that mutations or dis- 
continuous variations in various directions may appear 
simultaneously in many individuals, and in various 
directions. In the gardener’s phrase, the species may 
take to sporting in various directions at the same time, 
and each sport may be represented by numerous speci- 
mens. 

De Vries shows the probability that species go on for 
long periods showing only fluctuations, and then suddenly 
take to sporting in the way described, short periods of 
mutation alternating with long intervals of relative con- 
stancy. It is to mutations that De Vries and his school, as 
well as Luther Burbank, the great former of new fruit- and 
flower-plants, look for those variations which form the 
material of Natural Selection. In ‘‘ God the Known and 
God the Unknown,” which appeared in the Examiner 
(May, June, and July), 1879, but though then revised was 
only published posthumously in 1909, Butler anticipates 
this distinction :— 


Under these circumstances organism must act in one or 
other of these two ways: it must either change slowly and 
continuously with the surroundings, paying cash for every- 
thing, meeting the smallest change with a corresponding 
modification, so far as is found convenient, or it must put off 
change as long as possible, and then make larger and more 
sweeping changes. 

Both these courses are the same in principle, the differ- 
ence being one of scale, and the one being a miniature of the 
other, as a ripple is an Atlantic wave in little; both have 
their advantages and disadvantages, so that most organisms 
will take the one course for one set of things and the other 
for another. They will deal promptly with things which they 
can get at easily, and which lie more upon the surface; those, 
however, which ave move troublesome to veach, and lie deeper, 
will be handled upon more cataclysmic principles, being allowed 
longer periods of vepose followed by short periods of greater 
activity . . . it may be questioned whether what is called a 


Introduction XXVI1 


sport is not the organic expression of discontent which has 
been long felt, but which has not been attended to, nor been 
met step by step by as much small remedial modification as 
was found practicable: so that when a change does come 
it comes by way of revolution. Or, again (only that it comes 
to much the same thing), it may be compared to one of those 
happy thoughts which sometimes come to us unbidden after 
we have been thinking for a long time what to do, or how to 
arrange our ideas, and have yet been unable to come to any 
conclusion (pp. 14, 15).? 


We come to another order of mind in Hans Driesch. At 
the time he began his work biologists were largely busy 
in a region indicated by Darwin, and roughly mapped out 
by Haeckel—that of phylogeny. From the facts of develop- 
ment of the individual, from the comparison of fossils in 
successive strata, they set to work at the construction of 
pedigrees, and strove to bring into line the principles of 
classification with the more or less hypothetical “ stem- 
trees.’”’ Driesch considered this futile, since we never could 
reconstruct from such evidence anything certain in the 
history of the past. He therefore asserted that a more 
complete knowledge of the physics and chemistry of the 
organic world might give a scientific explanation of the 
phenomena, and maintained that the proper work of the 
biologist was to deepen our knowledge in these respects. 
He embodied his views, seeking the explanation on this 
track, filling up gaps and tracing projected roads along 
lines of probable truth in his “ Analytische Theorie der 
organischen Entwicklung.” But his own work convinced 
him of the hopelessness of the task he had undertaken, 
and he has become as strenuous a vitalist as Butler. The 
most complete statement of his present views is to be 
found in ‘“‘ The Philosophy of Life ” (1908-9), being the 
Gifford Lectures for 1907-8. Herein he postulates a 
quality (“‘ psychoid ”’) in all living beings, directing energy 


1 Mr. H. Festing Jones first directed my attention to these 
passages and their bearing on the Mutation Theory. 


xxvill Unconscious Memory 


and matter for the purpose of the organism, and to this he 
applies the Aristotelian designation “ Entelechy.” The 
question of the transmission of acquired characters is re- 
garded as doubtful, and he does not emphasise—if he 
accepts—the doctrine of continuous personality. His 
early youthful impatience with descent theories and hypo- 
theses has, however, disappeared. 


In the next work the influence of Hering and Butler is 
definitely present-and recognised. In 1906 Signor Eugenio 
Rignano, an engineer keenly interested in all branches of 
science, and a little later the founder of the inter- 
national review, Rivista di Scienza (now simply called 
Scientia), published in French a volume entitled “ Sur 
la transmissibilité des Caractéres acquis—Hypothése d’une 
Centro-épigenése.”’ Into the details of the author’s work 
we will not enter fully. Suffice it to know that he accepts 
the Hering-Butler theory, and makes a distinct advance on 
Hering’s rather crude hypothesis of persistent vibrations 
by suggesting that the remembering centres store slightly 
different forms of energy, to give out energy of the same 
kind as they have received, like electrical accumulators. 
The last chapter, “Le Phénoméne mnémonique et le 
Phénomeéne vital,’’ is frankly based on Hering. 

In “ The Lesson of Evolution ” (1907, posthumous, and 
only published for private circulation) Frederick Wollaston 
Hutton, F.R.s., late Professor of Biology and Geology, first 
at Dunedin and after at Christchurch, New Zealand, puts 
forward a strongly vitalistic view, and adopts Hering’s 
teaching. After stating this he adds, ‘“‘ The same idea 
of heredity being due to unconscious memory was 
advocated by Mr. Samuel Butler in his ‘Life and 
Habithe: 

Dr. James Mark Baldwin, Stuart Professor of Psychology 
in Princeton University, U.S.A., called attention early in 
the go’s to a reaction characteristic of all living beings, 
which he terms the ‘‘ Circular Reaction.” We take his 


Introduction XX1X 


most recent account of this from his ‘“ Development and 
Evolution ’’ (1902) :—? 

The general fact is that the organism reacts by concen- 
tration upon the locality stimulated for the continuance of 
the conditions, movements, stimulations, which ave vitally 
beneficial, and for the cessation of the conditions, movements, 
stimulations which are vitally depressing. 


This amounts to saying in the terminology of Jennings 
(see below) that the living organism alters its ‘ physio- 
logical states” either for its direct benefit, or for its in- 
direct benefit in the reduction of harmful conditions. 

Again :— 

This form of concentration of energy on stimulated locali- 
ties, with the resulting renewal through movement of con- 
ditions that are pleasure-giving and beneficial, and the 


consequent repetition of the movements is called “ circular 
reaction.” 


Of course, the inhibition of such movements as would 
be painful on repetition is merely the negative case of the 
circular reaction. We must not put too much of our own 
ideas into the author’s mind ; he nowhere says explicitly 
that the animal or plant shows its sense and does this 
because it likes the one thing and wants it repeated, or 
dislikes the other and stops its repetition, as Butler would 
have said. Baldwin is very strong in insisting that no 
full explanation can be given of living processes, any more 
than of history, on purely chemico-physical grounds. 

The same view is put differently and independently by 
H. S. Jennings,2 who started his investigations of living 

1 He says in a note, ‘This general type of reaction was de- 
scribed and illustrated in a different connection by Pfluger in 
‘Pfliiger’s Archiv. f.d. ges. Physiologie,’ Bd. XV.” The essay 


bears the significant title ‘“‘ Die teleologische Mechanik der lebendigen 
Natur,’ and is a very remarkable one, as coming from an official 
physiologist in 1877, when the chemico-physical school was nearly 
at its zenith. 

2 “ Contributions to the Study of the Lower Animals ’’ (1904), 
“‘Modifiability in Behaviour’? and ‘“‘ Method of Regulability in 
Behaviour and in other Fields,” in Journ. Experimental Zoology, 
vol. li. (1905). 


XXX Unconscious Memory 


Protista, the simplest of living beings, with the idea that 
only accurate and ample observation was needed to enable 
us to explain all their activities on a mechanical basis, and 
devised ingenious models of protoplastic movements. He 
was led, like Driesch, to renounce such efforts as illusory, 
and has come to the conviction that in the behaviour of 
these lowly beings there is a purposive and a tentative 
character—a method of “ trial and error ’—that can only 
be interpreted by the invocation of psychology. He points 
out that after stimulation the “‘state”’ of the organism 
may be altered, so that the response to the same stimulus 
on repetition is other. Or, as he puts it, the first stimulus 
has caused the organism to pass into a new “‘ physiological 
state.’ As the change of state from what we may call the 
“primary indifferent state’ is advantageous to the or- 
ganism, we may regard this as equivalent to the doctrine 
of the “circular reaction,’ and also as containing the 
essence of Semon’s doctrine of ‘‘ engrams” or imprints 
which we are about to consider. We cite one passage 
which for audacity of thought (underlying, it is true, most 
guarded expression) may well compare with many of the 
boldest flights in ‘‘ Life and Habit ” :— 


It may be noted that regulation in the manner we have 
set forth is what, in the behaviour of higher organisms, at 
least, is called intelligence [the examples have been taken from 
Protista, Corals, and the Lowest Worms]. If the same method 
of regulation is found in other fields, there is no reason for 
refusing to compare the action to intelligence. Comparison 
of the regulatory processes that are shown in internal physio- 
logical changes and in regeneration to intelligence seems to be 
looked upon sometimes as heretical and unscientific. Yet 
intelligence is a name applied to processes that actually exist 
in the regulation of movements, and there is, a priori, no 
reason why similar processes should not occur in regulation 
in other fields. When we analyse regulation obj ectively there 
seems indeed reason to think that the processes are of the 
same character in behaviour as elsewhere. If the term in- 
telligence be reserved for the subjective accompaniments of 
such regulation, then of course we have no direct knowledge 


Introduction XXX1 


of its existence in any of the fields of regulation outside of 
the self, and in the self perhaps only in behaviour. But in 
a purely objective consideration there seems no reason to 
suppose that regulation in behaviour (intelligence) is of a 
fundamentally different character from regulation elsewhere. 
(‘‘ Method of Regulation,” p. 492.) 


Jennings makes no mention of questions of the theory 
of heredity. He has made some experiments on the trans- 
mission of an acquired character in Protozoa ; but it was a 
mutilation-character, which is, as has been often shown,} 
not to the point. 


One of the most obvious criticisms of Hering’s exposi- 
tion is based upon the extended use he makes of the word 
‘“Memory ”: this he had foreseen and deprecated. 


We have a perfect right [he says] to extend our con- 
ception of memory so as to make it embrace involuntary 
[and also unconscious] reproductions of sensations, ideas, 
perceptions, and efforts; but we find, on having done so, 
that we have so far enlarged her boundaries that she proves 
to be an ultimate and original power, the source and, at the 
same time, the unifying bond, of our whole conscious life. 
(“‘ Unconscious Memory,’’ p. 68.) 


This sentence, coupled with Hering’s omission to give 
to the concept of memory so enlarged a new name, clear 
alike of the limitations and of the stains of habitual use, 
may well have been the inspiration of the next work on 
our list. Richard Semon is a professional zoologist and 
anthropologist of such high status for his original observa- 
tions and researches in the mere technical sense, that in 
these countries he would assuredly have been acclaimed 
as one of the Fellows of the Royal Society who were 
Samuel Butler’s special aversion. The full title of his 
book is ‘‘ Diz MNEmE als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel 


1 See ‘The Hereditary Transmission of Acquired Characters ” 
in Contemporary Review, September and November 1908, in which 
references are given to earlier statements. 


XXX Unconscious Memory 


des organischen Geschehens ”’ (Munich, Ed. 1, 1904; Ed. 
2, 1908). We may translate it “‘ MNEME, a Principle of 
Conservation in the Transformations of Organic Exist- 
ence. 

From this I quote in free translation the opening passage 
of Chapter IT :-— 


We have shown that in very many cases, whether in 
Protist, Plant, or Animal, when an organism has passed into 
an indifferent state after the reaction to a stimulus has ceased, 
its irritable substance has suffered a lasting change: I call 
this after-action of the stimulus its ‘‘ imprint ” or ‘‘ engraphic ” 
action, since it penetrates and imprints itself in the organic 
substance ; and I term the change so effected an ‘‘ imprint ’’ 
or “‘engram ”’ of the stimulus; and the sum of all the im- 
prints possessed by the organism may be called its “ store of 
imprints,’’ wherein we must distinguish between those which 
it has inherited from its forbears and those which it has 
acquired itself. Any phenomenon displayed by an organism 
as the result either of a single imprint or of a sum of them, 
I term a ‘“‘mnemic phenomenon”; and the mnemic possi- 
bilities of an organism may be termed, collectively, its 
““ MNEME.”’ 

I have selected my own terms for the concepts that I have 
just defined. On many grounds I refrain from making any 
use of the good German terms ‘ Gediachtniss, Erinnerungs- 
bild.”” The first and chiefest ground is that for my purpose I 
should have to employ the German words in a much wider 
sense than what they usually convey, and thus leave the door 
open to countless misunderstandings and idle controversies. 
It would, indeed, even amount to an error of fact to give to 
the wider concept the name already current in the narrower 
sense—nay, actually limited, like ‘“‘ Erinnerungsbild,’”’ to phe- 
nomena of consciousness. . . . In Animals, during the course 
of history, one set of organs has, so to speak, specialised itself 
for the reception and transmission of stimuli—the Nervous 
System. But from this specialisation we are not justified in 
ascribing to the nervous system any monopoly of the function, 
even when it is as highly developed as in Man. . . . Just as 
the direct excitability of the nervous system has progressed 
in the history of the race, so has its capacity for receiving 
imprints; but neither susceptibility nor retentiveness is its 
monopoly ; and, indeed, retentiveness seems inseparable from 
susceptibility in living matter. 


Introduction XXXII 


Semon here takes the instance of stimulus and imprint 
actions affecting the nervous system of a dog 


who has up till now never experienced aught but kindness 
from the Lord of Creation, and then one day that he is out 
alone is pelted with stones by a boy. . . . Here he is affected 
at once by two sets of stimuli: (1) the optic stimulus of 
seeing the boy stoop for stones and throw them, and (2) the 
skin stimulus of the pain felt when they hit him. Here both 
stimuli leave their imprints ; and the organism is permanently 
changed in relation to the recurrence of the stimuli. Hitherto 
the sight of a human figure quickly stooping had produced no 
constant special reaction. Now the reaction is constant, and 
may remain so till death. . . . The dog tucks in its tail be- 
tween its legs and takes flight, often with a howl [as of] pain. 

Here we gain on one side a deeper insight into 
the imprint action of stimuli. It reposes on the lasting 
change in the conditions of the living matter, so that the 
repetition of the immediate or synchronous reaction to its 
first stimulus (in this case the stooping of the boy, the flying 
stones, and the pain on the ribs), no longer demands, as in 
the original state of indifference, the full stimulus a, but may 
be called forth by a partial or different stimulus, 6 (in this 
case the mere stooping to the ground). I term the influences 
by which such changed reaction are rendered possible, ‘‘ out- 
come-reactions,’’ and when such influences assume the form of 
stimuli, ‘‘ outcome-stimuli.”’ 


£ 


They are termed “ outcome” (‘‘ecphoria’’) stimuli, 
because the author regards them and would have us regard 
them as the outcome, manifestation, or efference of an 
imprint of a previous stimulus. We have noted that the 
imprint is equivalent to the changed “ physiological 
state’’ of Jennings. Again, the capacity for gaining 
imprints and revealing them by outcomes favourable to 
the individual is the “‘ circular reaction ’’ of Baldwin, but 
Semon gives no reference to either author.! 

1 Semon’s technical terms are exclusively taken from the Greek, 
but as experience tells that plain men in England have a special 
dread of suchlike, I have substituted ‘‘imprint’’ for ‘‘ engram,’’ 
“outcome ”’ for “ ecphoria’’; for the latter term I had thought of 
‘‘efference,”’ ‘‘ manifestation,” etc., but decided on what looked 


more homely, and at the same time was quite distinctive enough to 
avoid that confusion which Semon has dodged with his Grecisms. 


c 


XXXIV Unconscious Memory 


In the preface to his first edition (reprinted in the second) 
Semon writes, after discussing the work of Hering and 
Haeckel :— 


The problem received a more detailed treatment in 
Samuel Butler’s book, ‘‘ Life and Habit,’’ published in 1878. 
Though he only made acquaintance with Hering’s essay after 
this publication, Butler gave what was in many respects a 
more detailed view of the coincidences of these different phe- 
nomena of organic reproduction than did Hering. With much 
that is untenable, Butler’s writings present many a brilliant 
idea; yet, on the whole, they are rather a retrogression than 
an advance upon Hering. Evidently they failed to exercise 
any marked influence upon the literature of the day. 


This judgment needs a little examination. , Butler 
claimed, justly, that his “‘ Life and Habit’ was an 
advance on Hering in its dealing with questions of 
hybridity, and of longevity, puberty and sterility. Since 
Semon’s extended treatment of the phenomena of crosses 
might almost be regarded as the rewriting of the corre- 
sponding section of “‘ Life and Habit ” in the ‘‘ Mneme ” 
terminology, we may infer that this view of the question 
was one of Butler’s “ brilliant ideas.”” That Butler shrank 
from accepting such a formal explanation of memory 
as Hering did with his hypothesis should certainly be 
counted as a distinct “‘advance upon Hering,” for 
Semon also avoids any attempt at an explanation 
of ‘“‘Mneme.” I think, however, we may gather the 
real meaning of Semon’s strictures from the following 
passages :— 


I refrain here from a discussion of the development of 
this theory of Lamarck’s by those Neo-Lamarckians who 
would ascribe to the individual elementary organism an equip- 
ment of complex psychical powers—so to say, anthropo- 
morphic perception and volitions. This treatment is no 
longer directed by the scientific principle of referring complex 
phenomena to simpler laws, of deducing even human intellect 
and will from simpler elements. On the contrary, they follow 
that most abhorrent method of taking the most complex and 


Introduction XXXV 


unresolved as a datum, and employing it as an explanation. 
The adoption of such a method, as formerly by Samuel Butler, 
and recently by Pauly, I regard as a big and dangerous step 
backward (ed. 2, pp. 380-1, note). 


Thus Butler’s alleged retrogressions belong to the same 
order of thinking that we have seen shared by Driesch, 
Baldwin, and Jennings, and most explicitly avowed, as 
we shall see, by Francis Darwin. Semon makes one rather 
candid admission, “‘ The impossibility of interpreting the 
phenomena of physiological stimulation by those of direct 
reaction, and the undeception of those who had put faith 
in this being possible, have led many on the backward path 
of vitalism.’’ Semon assuredly will never be able to complete 
his theory of ““Mneme”’ until, guided by the experience 
of Jennings and Driesch, he forsakes the blind alley 
of mechanisticism and retraces his steps to reasonable 
vitalism. 


But the most notable publications bearing on our matter 
are incidental to the Darwin Celebrations of 1908-9. 
Dr. Francis Darwin, son, collaborator, and biographer of 
Charles Darwin, was selected to preside over the Meeting 
of the British Association held in Dublin in 1908, the 
jubilee of the first publications on Natural Selection by 
his father and Alfred Russel Wallace. In this address we 
find the theory of Hering, Butler, Rignano, and Semon 
taking its proper place as a vera causa of that variation 
which Natural Selection must find before it can act, and 
recognised as the basis of a rational theory of the develop- 
ment of the individual and of the race. The organism is 
essentially purposive: the impossibility of devising any 
adequate accounts of organic form and function without 
taking account of the psychical side is most strenuously 
asserted. And with our regret that past misunderstand- 
ings should be so prominent in Butler’s works, it was very 
pleasant to hear Francis Darwin’s quotation from Butler’s 


xxxv1 Unconscious Memory 


translation of Hering! followed by a personal tribute to 
Butler himself. 


In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of 
Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the 
publication of the “‘ Origin of Species,” at the suggestion 
of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the University 
Press published during the current year a volume entitled 
“Darwin and Modern Science,’”’ edited by Mr. A. C. 
Seward, Professor of Botany in the University. Of the 
twenty-nine essays by men of science of the highest dis- 
tinction, one is of peculiar interest to the readers of Samuel 
Butler: ‘“‘ Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights,” by 
Professor W. Bateson, F.R.s., to whose work on “ Dis- 
continuous Variations’ we have already referred. Here 
once more Butler receives from an official biologist of the 
first rank full recognition for his wonderful insight and 
keen critical power. This is the more noteworthy be- 
cause Bateson has apparently no faith in the transmission 
of acquired characters ; but such a passage as this would 
have commended itself to Butler’s admiration :— 


All this indicates a definiteness and specific order in 
heredity, and therefore in variation. This order cannot by 
the nature of the case be dependent on Natural Selection for 
its existence, but must be a consequence of the fundamental 
chemical and physical nature of living things. The study of 
Variation had from the first shown that an orderliness of this 
kind was present. The bodies and properties of living things 
are cosmic, not chaotic. No matter how low in the scale we 
go, never do we find the slightest hint of a diminution in that 
all-pervading orderliness, nor can we conceive an organism 
existing for one moment in any other state. 


We have now before us the materials to determine the 
problem of Butler’s relation to biology and to biologists. 


* “ Between the ‘me’ of to-day and the ‘me’ of yesterday lie 
night and sleep, abysses of unconsciousness; nor is there any 
bridge but memory with which to span them.’—Unconscious 
Memory, p. 71. 


Introduction XXXVIl 


He was, we have seen, anticipated by Hering; but his 
attitude was his own, fresh and original. He did not 
hamper his exposition, like Hering, by a subsidiary hypo- 
thesis of vibrations which may or may not be true, which 
burdens the theory without giving it greater carrying 
power or persuasiveness, which is based on no objective 
facts, and which, as Semon has practically demonstrated 
is needless for the detailed working out of the theory. 
Butler failed to impress the biologists of his day, even 
those on whom, like Romanes, he might have reasonably 
counted for understanding and for support. But he kept 
alive Hering’s work when it bade fair to sink into the limbo 
of obsolete hypotheses. To use Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 
phrase, he ‘‘ depolarised’’ evolutionary thought. We 
quote the words of a young biologist, who, when an ardent 
and dogmatic Weismannist of the most pronounced type, 
was induced to read “‘ Life and Habit’’: ‘‘ The book was 
to me a transformation and an inspiration.” Such learned 
writings as Semon’s or Hering’s could never produce such 
an effect: they do not penetrate to the heart of man ; 
they cannot carry conviction to the intellect already filled 
full with rival theories, and with the unreasoned faith 
that to-morrow or next day a new discovery will obliterate 
all distinction between Man and his makings. The mind 
must needs be open for the reception of truth, for the re- 
jection of prejudice ; and the violence of a Samuel Butler 
may in the future as in the past be needed to shatter the 
coat of mail forged by too exclusively professional a 


training. MARCUS HARTOG. 
Cork, April, 1910. 


Postscript 


T had been my intention to complete this Introduction by a 
I survey of the chief references to Butler’s biological work that 
have appeared recently; unfortunately the dislocation of the 
book trade, due to the war, has so far prevented my doing so in 


xxxviil Unconscious Memory 


anything like a satisfactory manner. But it would appear unreason- 
able not to cite the titles of the more important of them. 

In 1911 appeared a pamphlet ‘‘Charles Darwin and Samuel 
Butler : a Step towards Reconciliation’ by Henry Festing Jones 
(Tifield, London). From Mr. Jones’ recent Memoir of Butler we 
learn that this pamphlet was published at the joint expense of Sir 
Francis Darwin and himself; it does much to clear up the circum- 
stances of the misunderstanding which had left unpleasant feelings 
in the minds of those who felt their great debt to both Darwin and 
Butler. The circumstances, so far as they were known to Butler, 
are set forth in chapter iv. of this volume, pp. 38-51. The Memoir 
Shows too that Butler’s indignation was largely justified by the 
attack made on him. by Professor Ernst Krause in preparing his 
“Erasmus Darwin” for translation under Darwin’s auspices, an 
attack repeated and aggravated in ‘‘ Charles Darwin ”’ by Ernst 
Krause (Leipzig, 1885). 

I have been informed that in the second volume of “‘ Geschichte 
der Biologischen Theorien seit dem Ende des Siebzehnten 
Jahrhunderts ” by Dr. Em. Radi (Leipzig, Engelmann, 1909) there 
is a chapter headed ‘Samuel Butler.”” So far I have been unable 
to procure a copy of this work, the author of which is one of the most 
original thinkers among present-day biologists. 

“ Form and Function,” by E. S. Russell appeared in 1916 and 
contains a chapter entitled ‘‘ Samuel Butler.” 

In “An Introduction to Biology and other Papers” (Cassell, 
1917), the posthumous work of Arthur D. Darbishire, one of the 
victims of the war, it is stated that ‘‘ the main constructive thesis 
of the book is the idea, which we owe to Samuel Butler, that the 
details of evolution can be studied most minutely in man.’ Darbi- 
shire was the ‘ young biologist” referred to in my Introduction 
(p. xxxv.), to whom it befell that the reading of ‘‘ Life and Habit’”’ 
was “a transformation and an inspiration.” 

In this year’s Hunterian Oration, Dr. Landon Brown not only 
shows that he is fully imbued with Butler’s teaching, he also gives 
due credit to his teacher. 

For this hurried and scrappy Postscript I hope to be able to 
substitute on some future occasion a better survey of the position 
wherein all the important references to Butler’s views on evolution 
Shall be included under their most recent descriptions. In the 
preceding Introduction are references to extracts from Butler’s 
“‘ Note-Books’”’ which in 1910 were appearing in the New Quarterly 
Review; they have since been collected into the volume “ The 
Note-Books of Samuel Butler” (1912). And the volume referred to 
as ““ Essays on Life, Art and Science ” has since been reissued with 
additions as ‘‘ The Humour of Homer, and other Essays ’’ (1913). 


Marcus Hartoac. 
April 16, 1920. 


Author’s Preface to First Edition 


OT finding the “well-known German scientific 

journal Kosmos ’’! entered in the British Museum 
Catalogue, I have presented the Museum with a copy of 
the number for February 1879, which contains the article 
by Dr. Krause of which Mr. Charles Darwin has given a 
translation, the accuracy of which is guaranteed—so 
he informs us—by the translator’s “ scientific reputation 
together with his knowledge of German.’’? 

I have marked the copy, so that the reader can see at a 
glance what passages have been suppressed and where 
matter has been interpolated. 

I have also presented a copy of “ Erasmus Darwin.” 
I have marked this too, so that the genuine and spurious 
passages can be easily distinguished. 

I understand that both the “‘ Erasmus Darwin ”’ and 
the number of Kosmos have been sent to the Keeper of 
Printed Books, with instructions that they shall be at 
once catalogued and made accessible to readers, and do 
not doubt that this will have been done before the present 
volume is published. The reader, therefore, who may be 
sufficiently interested in the matter to care to see exactly 
what has been done will now have an opportunity of 
doing so. 


October 25, 1880. 


1 Preface by Mr. Charles Darwin to “‘ Erasmus Darwin.” The 
Museum has copies of a Kosmos that was published 1857-60 and then 
discontinued ; but this is clearly not the Kosmos referred to by Mr, 
Darwin, which began to appear in 1878. 

2 Preface to ‘ Erasmus Darwin.”’ 


XXX1X 


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Unconscious Mem ory 


Chapter I 


Introduction—General ignorance on the subject of evolution at 
the time the “‘ Origin of Species ”’ was published in 1859. 


HERE are few things which strike us with more sur- 

prise, when we review the course taken by opinion in 
the last century, than the suddenness with which belief in 
witchcraft and demoniacal possession came to an end. This 
has been often remarked upon, but I am not acquainted 
with any record of the fact as it appeared to those under 
whose eyes the change was taking place, nor have I seen 
any contemporary explanation of the reasons which led 
to the apparently sudden overthrow of a belief which 
had seemed hitherto to be deeply rooted in the minds of 
almost all men. As a parallel to this, though in respect 
of the rapid spread of an opinion, and not its decadence, 
it is probable that those of our descendants who take an 
interest in ourselves will note the suddenness with which 
the theory of evolution, from having been generally 
ridiculed during a period of over a hundred years, came 
into popularity and almost universal acceptance among 
educated people. 

It is indisputable that this has been the case; nor is it 
less indisputable that the works of Mr. Darwin and Mr. 
Wallace have been the main agents in the change that has 
been brought about in our opinions. The names of Cobden 
and Bright do not stand more prominently forward in 

B 


2 Unconscious Memory 


connection with the repeal of the Corn Laws than do those of 
Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace in connection with the general 
acceptance of the theory of evolution. There is no living 
philosopher who has anything like Mr. Darwin’s popu- 
larity with Englishmen generally ; and not only this, but 
his power of fascination extends all over Europe, and in- 
deed in every country in which civilisation has obtained a 
footing : not among the illiterate masses, though these are 
rapidly following the suit of the educated classes, but among 
experts and those who are most capable of judging. France, 
indeed—the country of Buffon and Lamarck—must be 
counted an exception to the general rule, but in England 
and Germany there are few men of scientific reputation 
who do not accept Mr. Darwin as the founder of what is 
commonly called ‘‘ Darwinism,’ and regard him as per- 
haps the most penetrative and profound philosopher of 
modern times. 

To quote an example from the last few weeks only, I 
have observed that Professor Huxley has celebrated the 
twenty-first year since the ‘‘ Origin of Species *’ was pub- 
lished by a lecture at the Royal Institution, and am told 
that he described Mr. Darwin’s candour as something 
actually “ terrible’’ (I give Professor Huxley’s own word, 
as reported by one who heard it) ; and on opening a small 
book entitled “‘ Degeneration,” by Professor Ray Lankester, 
published a few days before these lines were written, I find the 
following passage amid more that is to the same purport :— 

Suddenly one of those great guesses which occasionally 
appear in the history of science was given to the science of 
biology by the imaginative insight of that greatest of living 
naturalists—I would say that greatest of living men—Charles 
Darwin.—‘‘ Degeneration,”’ p. Io. 


This is very strong language, but it is hardly stronger 
than that habitually employed by the leading men of 
science when they speak of Mr. Darwin. To go farther 
afield, in February 1879 the Germans devoted an entire 

1 May 1880, 


Introduction 3 


number of one of their scientific periodicals } to the celebra- 
tion of Mr. Darwin’s seventieth birthday. There is no 
other Englishman now living who has been able to win 
such a compliment as this from foreigners, who should be 
disinterested judges. 

Under these circumstances, it must seem the height of 
presumption to differ from so great an authority, and to 
join the small band of malcontents who hold that Mr. 
Darwin’s reputation as a philosopher, though it has grown 
up with the rapidity of Jonah’s gourd, will yet not be per- 
manent. I believe, however, that though we must always 
gladly and gratefully owe it to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace 
that the public mind has been brought to accept evolution, 
the admiration now generally felt for the “ Origin of 
Species ” will appear as unaccountable to our descendants 
some fifty or eighty years hence as the enthusiasm of our 
grandfathers for the poetry of Dr. Erasmus Darwin does to 
ourselves; and as one who has yielded to none in respect 
of the fascination Mr. Darwin has exercised over him, I 
would fain say a few words of explanation which may 
make the matter clearer to our future historians. I do this 
the more readily because I can at the same time explain 
thus better than in any other way the steps which led me 
to the theory which I afterwards advanced in “ Life and 
Habit.” 

This last, indeed, is perhaps the main purpose of the 
earlier chapters of this book. I shall presently give a 
translation of a lecture by Professor Ewald Hering of 
Prague, which appeared ten years ago, and which contains 
so exactly the theory I subsequently advocated myself, 
that I am half uneasy lest it should be supposed that I 
knew of Professor Hering’s work and made no reference to 
it. A friend to whom I submitted my translation in MS., 
asking him how closely he thought it resembled “ Life and 
Habit,’’ wrote back that it gave my own ideas almost in 
my own words. As far as the ideas are concerned this is 

1 Kosmos, February 1879, Leipsic. 


4 Unconscious Memory 


certainly the case, and considering that Professor Hering 
wrote between seven and eight years before I did, I think 
it due to him, and to my readers as well as to myself, to 
explain the steps which led me to my conclusions, and, 
while putting Professor Hering’s lecture before them, to 
show cause for thinking that I arrived at an almost 
identical conclusion, as it would appear, by an almost 
identical road, yet, nevertheless, quite independently. 
I must ask the reader, therefore, to regard these earlier 
chapters as in some measure a personal explanation, as 
well as a contribution to the history of an important 
feature in the developments of the last twenty years. I 
hope also, by showing the steps by which I was led to my 
conclusions, to make the conclusions themselves more 
acceptable and easy of comprehension. 

Being on my way to New Zealand when the “ Origin of 
Species’ appeared, I did not get it till 1860 or I86T. 
When I read it, I found “‘ the theory of natural selection ”’ 
repeatedly spoken of as though it were a synonym for 
“the theory of descent with modification ’’ ; this is especi- 
ally the case in the recapitulation chapter of the work. I 
failed to see how important it was that these two theories 
—if indeed “ natural selection ’”’ can be called a theory— 
should not be confounded together, and that a “ theory of 
descent with modification ’’ might be true, while a “ theory 
of descent with modification through natural selection ’’.? 
might not stand being looked into. 

If any one had asked me to state in brief what Mr. 
Darwin’s theory was, I am afraid I might have answered 
“natural selection,’ or ‘‘ descent with modification,” 
whichever came first, as though the one meant much the 
same as the other. I observe that most of the leading 
writers on the subject are still unable to catch sight of the 
distinction here alluded to, and console myself for my 
want of acumen by reflecting that, if I was misled, I was 
misled in good company. 

1 “ Origin of Species,’ ed.i., p. 459. 


Introduction 5 


I—and I may add, the public generally—tfailed also to 
see what the unaided reader who was new to the subject 
would be almost certain to overlook. I mean, that, 
according to Mr. Darwin, the variations whose accumulation 
resulted in diversity of species and genus were indefinite, 
fortuitous, attributable but in small degree to any known 
causes, and without a general principle underlying them 
which would cause them to appear steadily in a given 
direction for many successive generations and in a con- 
siderable number of individuals at the same time. We 
did not know that the theory of evolution was one that had 
been quietly but steadily gaining ground during the last 
hundred years. Buffon we knew by name, but he sounded 
too like ‘‘ buffoon” for any good to come from him. We 
had heard also of Lamarck, and held him to be a kind of 
French Lord Monboddo; but we knew nothing of his 
doctrine save through the caricatures promulgated by 
his opponents, or the misrepresentations of those who had 
another kind of interest in disparaging him. Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin we believed to be a forgotten minor poet, but 
ninety-nine out of every hundred of us had never so much 
as heard of the ‘‘ Zoonomia.’”’ We were little likely, there- 
fore, to know that Lamarck drew very largely from Buffon, 
and probably also from Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and that 
this last-named writer, though essentially original, was 
founded upon Buffon, who was greatly more in advance 
of any predecessor than any successor has been in advance 
of him. 

We did not know, then, that according to the earlier 
writers the variations whose accumulation results in species 
were not fortuitous and definite, but were due to a known 
principle of universal application—namely, “sense of 
need ’—or apprehend the difference between a theory of 
evolution which has a backbone, as it were, in the tolerably 
constant or slowly varying needs of large numbers of 
individuals for long periods together, and one which has 
no such backbone, but according to which the progress 


6 Unconscious Memory 


of one generation is always liable to be cancelled and 
obliterated by that of the next. We did not know that 
the new theory in a quiet way professed to tell us less than 
the old had done, and declared that it could throw little if 
any light upon the matter which the earlier writers had 
endeavoured to illuminate as the central point in their 
system. We took it for granted that more light must 
be being thrown instead of less; and reading in perfect 
good faith, we rose from our perusal with the impression 
that Mr. Darwin was advocating the descent of all existing 
forms of life from a single, or from, at any rate, a very few 
primordial types; that no one else had done this hitherto, 
or that, if they had, they had got the whole subject into 
a mess, which mess, whatever it was—for we were never 
told this—was now being removed once for all by Mr. 
Darwin. 

The evolution part of the story, that is to say, the fact 
of evolution, remained in our minds as by far the most 
prominent feature in Mr. Darwin’s book; and _ being 
grateful for it, we were very ready to take Mr. Darwin’s 
work at the estimate tacitly claimed for it by himself, 
and vehemently insisted upon by reviewers in influential 
journals, who took much the same line towards the earlier 
writers on evolution as Mr. Darwin himself had taken. 
But perhaps nothing more prepossessed us in Mr. Darwin’s 
favour than the air of candour that was omnipresent 
throughout his work. The prominence given to the 
arguments of opponents completely carried us away ; it was 
this which threw us off our guard. It never occurred to us 
that there might be other and more dangerous opponents 
who were not brought forward. Mr. Darwin did not tell 
us what his grandfather and Lamarck would have had to 
say to this or that. Moreover, there was an unobtrusive 
parade of hidden learning and of difficulties at last over- 
come which was particularly grateful to us. Whatever 
opinion might be ultimately come to concerning the 
value of his theory, there could be but one about the value 


Introduction 7 


of the example he had set to men of science generally by 
the perfect frankness and unselfishness of his work. Friends 
and foes alike combined to do homage to Mr. Darwin in 
this respect. 

For, brilliant as the reception of the “ Origin of Species ”’ 
was, it met in the first instance with hardly less hostile 
than friendly criticism. But the attacks were ill-directed ; 
they came from a suspected quarter, and those who led 
them did not detect more than the general public had 
done what were the really weak places in Mr. Darwin's 
armour. They attacked him where he was strongest ; and 
above all, they were, as a general rule, stamped with a 
disingenuousness which at that time we believed to be 
peculiar to theological writers and alien to the spirit of 
science. Seeing, therefore, that the men of science ranged 
themselves more and more decidedly on Mr. Darwin's 
side, while his opponents had manifestly—so far as 1 can 
remember, all the more prominent among them—a bias 
to which their hostility was attributable, we left off look- 
ing at the arguments against “ Darwinism,’ aS we now 
began to call it, and pigeon-holed the matter to the effect 
that there was one evolution, and that Mr. Darwin was its 
prophet. 

The blame of our errors and oversights rests primarily 
with Mr. Darwin himself. The first, and far the most 
important, edition of the “ Origin of Species ’’ came out 
as a kind of literary Melchisedec, without father and with- 
out mother in the works of other people. Here is its 
opening paragraph :— 

When on board H.M.S. “ Beagle” as naturalist, I was 
much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the 
inhabitants of South America, and in the geological rela- 
tions of the present to the past inhabitants of that con- 
tinent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on 
the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has 
been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my 


return home, it occured to me, in 1837, that something 
might be made out on this question by patiently accumulating 


8 Unconscious Memory 


and reflecting upon all sorts of facts which would possibly 
have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I allowed 
myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short 
notes ; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions 
which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the 
present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope 
that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, 
as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming 
to a decision. 


In the latest edition this passage remains unaltered, 
except in one unimportant respect. What could more 
completely throw us off the scent of the earlier writers ? 
If they had written anything worthy of our attention, or 
indeed if there had been any earlier writers at all, Mr. 
Darwin would have been the first to tell us about them, 
and to award them their due meed of recognition. But 
no ; the whole thing was an original growth in Mr. Darwin’s 
mind, and he had never so much as heard of his grandfather, 
Dr. Erasmus Darwin. 

Dr. Krause, indeed, thought otherwise. In the number 
of Kosmos for February 1879 he represented Mr. Darwin 
as in his youth approaching the works of his grandfather 
with all the devotion which people usually feel for the 
writings of a renowned poet.2 This should perhaps be a 
delicately ironical way of hinting that Mr. Darwin did 
not read his grandfather’s books closely ; but I hardly 
think that Dr. Krause looked at the matter in this light, 
for he goes on to say that “ almost every single work of 
the younger Darwin may be paralleled by at least a chapter 
in the works of his ancestor: the mystery of heredity, 
adaptation, the protective arrangements of animals and 
plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the 
analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses ; nay, 
even the studies on infants are to be found already dis- 
cussed in the pages of the elder Darwin.’’? 


* “ Origin of Species,” ed.i., p. 1. 
* Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397. 
3 “ Erasmus Darwin,” by Ernst Krause, pp. 132, 133. 


Introduction 9 


Nevertheless, innocent as;Mr. Darwin’s opening sen- 
tence appeared, it contained’enough to have put us upon 
our guard. When he informed us that, on his return from 
a long voyage, “it occurred to”’ him that the way to 
make anything out about his subject was to collect and 
reflect upon the facts that bore upon it, it should have 
occurred to us in our turn, that when people betray a 
return of consciousness upon such matters as this, they 
are on the confines of that state in which other and not 
less elementary matters will not “occur to”’ them. The 
introduction of the word “ patiently’ should have been 
conclusive. I will not analyse more of the sentence, but 
will repeat the next two lines :—‘‘ After five years of 
work, I allowed myself to speculate upon the subject, and 
drew up some short notes.” We read this, thousands of 
us, and were blind. 

If Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s name was not mentioned in 
the first edition of the ‘‘ Origin of Species,” we should not 
be surprised at there being no notice taken of Buffon, or at 
Lamarck’s being referred to only twice—on the first 
occasion to be serenely waved aside, he and all his works ; } 
on the second,? to be commended on a point of detail. 
The author of the ‘‘ Vestiges of Creation ’’ was more 
widely known to English readers, having written more 
recently and nearer home. He was dealt with summarily, 
on an early and prominent page, by a misrepresentation, 
which was silently expunged in later editions of the ‘‘ Origin 
of Species.” In his later editions (I believe first in his 
third, when 6000 copies had been already sold), Mr. 
Darwin did indeed introduce a few pages in which he gave 
what he designated as a ‘‘ brief but imperfect sketch” of 
the progress of opinion on the origin of species prior to the 
appearance of his own work; but the general impression 
which a book conveys to, and leaves upon, the public is 
conveyed by the first edition—the one which is alone, 
with rare exceptions, reviewed ; and in the first edition 

1 ‘* Origin of Species,” ed.i., p. 242. 2 Ibid., p. 427. 


IO Unconscious Memory 


of the “ Origin of Species ’’ Mr. Darwin’s great precursors 
were all either ignored or misrepresented. Moreover, the 
“brief but imperfect sketch,’’ when it did come, was so 
very brief, but, in spite of this (for this is what I suppose 
Mr. Darwin must mean), so very imperfect, that it might 
as well have been left unwritten for all the help it gave the 
reader to see the true question at issue between the original 
propounders of the theory of evolution and Mr. Charles 
Darwin himself. 

That question is this: Whether variation is in the main 
attributable to a known general principle, or whether it is 
not ?>—whether the minute variations whose accumulation 
results in specific and generic differences are referable to 
something which will ensure their appearing in a certain 
definite direction, or in certain definite directions, for long 
periods together, and in many individuals, or whether 
they are not ?—whether, in a word, these variations are 
in the main definite or indefinite ? 

It is observable that the leading men of science seem 
rarely to understand this even now. I am told that Pro- 
fessor Huxley, in his recent lecture on the coming of age 
of the “ Origin of Species,’ never so much as alluded to 
the existence of any such division of opinion as this. He 
did not even, I am assured, mention “‘ natural selection,” 
but appeared to believe, with Professor Tyndall,+ that 
“evolution ’”’ is ‘‘ Mr. Darwin’s theory.” In his article 
on evolution in the latest edition of the “ Encyclopedia 
Britannica,’ I find only a veiled perception of the point 
wherein Mr. Darwin is at variance with his precursors. 
Professor Huxley evidently knows little of these writers 
beyond their names ; if he had known more, it is impossible 
he should have written that “‘ Buffon contributed nothing 
to the general doctrine of evolution,’’? and that Erasmus 
Darwin, ‘ though a zealous evolutionist, can hardly be 


1 Nineteenth Century, November 1878; ‘‘ Evolution, Old and 
New,” pp. 360, 361. 
2 “Encyclopedia Britannica,’ ed.ix., art. ‘‘ Evolution,” p. 748. 


Introduction II 


said to have made any real advance on his predecessors.” 4 
The article is in a high degree unsatisfactory, and betrays 
at once an amount of ignorance and of perception which 
leaves an uncomfortable impression. 

If this is the state of things that prevails even now, it 
is not surprising that in 1860 the general public should, 
with few exceptions, have known of only one evolution, 
namely, that propounded by Mr. Darwin. As a member 
of the general public, at that time residing eighteen miles 
from the nearest human habitation, and three days’ 
journey on horseback from a bookseller’s shop, I became 
one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers, and 
wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, 
except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown 
countries, that even literature can assume) upon the 
‘Origin of Species.” This production appeared in the 
Press, Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1861 or 1862, but I 
have long lost the only copy I had. 


1 Tbid. 


Chapter II 


How I came to write “‘ Life and Habit,’’ and the circumstances 
of its completion. 


T was impossible, however, for Mr. Darwin’s readers to 
leave the matter as Mr. Darwin had left it. We wanted 
to know whence came that germ or those germs of life which, 
if Mr. Darwin was right, were once the world’s only in- 
habitants. They could hardly have come hither from 
some other world; they could not in their wet, cold, 
slimy state have travelled through the dry ethereal medium 
which we call space, and yet remained alive. If they 
travelled slowly, they would die ; if fast, they would catch 
fire, as meteors do on entering the earth’s atmosphere. 
The idea, again, of their having been created by a quasi- 
anthropomorphic being out of the matter upon the earth 
was at variance with the whole spirit of evolution, which 
indicated that no such being could exist except as himself 
the result, and not the cause, of evolution. Having got 
back from ourselves to the monad, we were suddenly to 
begin again with something which was either unthink- 
able, or was only ourselves again upon a larger scale—to 
return to the same point as that from which we had 
started, only made harder for us to stand upon. 

There was only one other conception possible, namely, 
that the germs had been developed in the course of time 
from some thing or things that were not what we called 
living at all; that they had grown up, in fact, out of the 
material substances and forces of the world in some 
manner more or less analogous to that in which man had 
been developed from themselves. 

Te 


How I wrote “Life and Habit” 13 


I first asked myself whether lifer might not, after all, 
resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an 
inconceivably intricate mechanism. Kittens think our 
shoe-strings are alive when they see us lacing them, because 
they see the tag at the end jump about without under- 
standing all the ins and outs of how it comes to do so. 
‘Of course,” they argue, “‘if we cannot understand how a 
thing comes to move, it must move of itself, for there can 
be no motion beyond our comprehension but what is 
spontaneous; if the motion is spontaneous, the thing 
moving must be alive, for nothing can move of itself or 
without our understanding why unless it is alive. Every- 
thing that is alive and not too large can be tortured, and 
perhaps eaten; let us therefore spring upon the tag " ; 
and they spring upon it. Cats are above this; yet give 
the cat something which presents a few more of those 
appearances which she is accustomed to see whenever she 
sees life, and she will fall as easy a prey to the power which 
association exercises over all that lives as the kitten 
itself. Show her a toy-mouse that can run a few yards 
after being wound up; the form, colour, and action of a 
mouse being here, there is no good cat which will not con- 
clude that so many of the appearances of mousehood 
could not be present at the same time without the presence 
also of the remainder. She will, therefore, spring upon 
the toy as eagerly as the kitten upon the tag. 

Suppose the toy more complex still, so that it might 
run a few yards, stop, and run on again without an addi- 
tional winding up; and suppose it so constructed that it 
could imitate eating and drinking, and could make as 
though the mouse were cleaning its face with its paws. 
Should we not at first be taken in ourselves, and assume 
the presence of the remaining facts of life, though in 
reality they were not there? Query, therefore, whether 
a machine so complex as to be prepared with a correspond- 
ing manner of action for each one of the successive emer- 
gencies of life as it arose, would not take us in for good 


T4 Unconscious Memory 


and all, and look so much as if it were alive that, whether 
we liked it or not, we should be compelled to think it and 
call it so; and whether the being alive was not simply the 
being an exceedingly complicated machine, whose parts 
were set in motion by the action upon them of exterior 
circumstances ; whether, in fact, man was not a kind of 
toy-mouse in the shape of a man, only capable of going 
for seventy or eighty years, instead of half as many seconds, 
and as much more versatile as he is more durable? Of 
course I had an uneasy feeling that if I thus made all 
plants and men into machines, these machines must have 
what all other machines have if they are machines at all 
—a designer, and some one to wind them up and work 
them ; but I thought this might wait for the present, and 
was perfectly ready then, as now, to accept a designer 
from without, if the facts upon examination rendered 
such a belief reasonable. 

If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were 
only machines of so complicated a make that it was less 
trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of 
mechanism was “ being alive,’ why should not machines 
ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any 
rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be 
indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all 
to be? If it was only a case of their becoming more 
complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make 
them so. 

I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view 
comes to much the same as denying that there are such 
qualities as life and consciousness at all, and that this, 
again, works round to the assertion of their omnipresence 
in every molecule of matter, inasmuch as it destroys the 
separation between the organic and inorganic, and main- 
tains that whatever the organic is the inorganic is also. 
Deny it in theory as much as we please, we shall still always 
feel that an organic body, unless dead, is living and con- 
scious to a greater or less degree. Therefore, if we once 


How I wrote “ Life and Habit” 15 


break down the wall of partition between the organic and 
inorganic, the inorganic must be living and conscious also, 
up to a certain point. 

I have been at work on this subject now for nearly 
twenty years, what I have published being only a small 
part of what I have written and destroyed. I cannot, 
therefore, remember exactly how I stood in 1863. Nor 
can I pretend to see far into the matter even now ; for 
when I think of life, I find it so difficult, that I take refuge 
in death or mechanism; and when I think of death or 
mechanism, I find it so inconceivable, that it is easier to 
call it life again. The only thing of which I am sure is, 
that the distinction between the organic and inorganic 
is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other 
ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every 
molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the 
breaking up of an association or corporation, than to 
start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into 
them; and that, therefore, what we call the inorganic 
world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, 
and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, 
volition, and power of concerted action. It is only of late, 
however, that I have come to this opinion. 

One must start with a hypothesis, no matter how much 
one distrusts it ; so I started with man as a mechanism, 
this being the strand of the knot that I could then pick at 
most easily. Having worked upon it a certain time, | 
drew the inference about machines becoming animate, 
and in 1862 or 1863 wrote the sketch of the chapter on 
machines which I afterwards rewrote in “‘ Erewhon.”’ 
This sketch appeared in the Press, Canterbury, N.Z., June 
13, 1863 ; a copy of it is in the British Museum. 

I soon felt that though there was plenty of amusement 
to be got out of this line, it was one that I should have to 
leave sooner or later; I therefore left it at once for the 
view that machines were limbs which we had made, and 
carried outside our bodies instead of incorporating them 


16 Unconscious Memory 


with ourselves. A few days or weeks later than June 13, 
1863, I published a second letter in the Press putting this 
view forward. Of this letter I have lost the only copy I 
had ; I have not seen it for years. The first was certainly 
not good ; the second, if I remember rightly, was a good 
deal worse, though I believed more in the views it put 
forward than in those of the first letter. I had lost my 
copy before I wrote “‘ Erewhon,” and therefore only gave 
a couple of pages to it in that book; besides, there was 
more amusement-in the other view. I should perhaps say 
there was an intermediate extension of the first letter 
which appeared in the Reasoner, July 1, 1865. 

In 1870 and 1871, when I was writing “ Erewhon,”’ 
I thought the best way of looking at machines was to see 
them as limbs which we had made and carried about with 
us or left at home at pleasure. I was not, however, satisfied, 
and should have gone on with the subject at once if I had 
not been anxious to write “The Fair Haven,’ a book 
which is a development of a pamphlet I wrote in New 
Zealand and published in London in 1865. 

As soon as I had finished this, I returned to the old 
subject, on which I had already been engaged for nearly 
a dozen years as continuously as other business would 
allow, and proposed to myself to see not only machines 
as limbs, but also limbs as machines. I felt immediately 
that I was upon firmer ground. The use of the word 
“organ” for a limb told its own story ; the word could 
not have become so current under this meaning unless the 
idea of a limb as a tool or machine had been agreeable to 
common sense. What would follow, then, if we regarded 
our limbs and organs as things that we had ourselves 
manufactured for our convenience ? 

The first question that suggested itself was, how did 
we come to make them without knowing anything about 
it? And this raised another, namely, how comes anybody 
to do anything unconsciously ? The answer “ habit ” 
was not far toseek. But can a person be said to do a thing 


How I wrote “ Life and Habit” 17 


by force of habit or routine when it is his ancestors, and 
not he, that has done it hitherto? Not unless he and his 
ancestors are one and the same person. Perhaps, then, 
they are the same person after all. What is sameness ? 
I remembered Bishop Butler’s sermon on “ Personal 
Identity,” read it again, and saw very plainly that if a 
man of eighty may consider himself identical with the baby 
from whom he has developed, so that he may say, “ I 
am the person who at six months old did this or that,”’ 
then the baby may just as fairly claim identity with its 
father and mother, and say to its parents on being born, 
‘““T was you only a few months ago.’ By parity of reason- 
ing each living form now on the earth must be able to 
claim identity with each generation of its ancestors up to 
the primordial cell inclusive. 

Again, if the octogenarian may claim personal identity 
with the infant, the infant may certainly do so with the 
impregnate ovum from which it has developed. If so, 
the octogenarian will prove to have been a fish once in 
this his present life. This is as certain as that he was 
living yesterday, and stands on exactly the same founda- 
tion. 

I am aware that Professor Huxley maintains otherwise. 
He writes: “It is not true, for example, ... that a 
reptile was ever a fish, but it is true that the reptile em- 
bryo ”’ (and what is said here of the reptile holds good also 
for the human embryo), “‘ at one stage of its development, 
is an organism, which, if it had an independent existence, 
must be classified among fishes.” 4 

This is like saying, ‘‘ It is not true that such and such 
a picture was rejected for the Academy, but it is true that 
it was submitted to the President and Council of the 
Royal Academy, with a view to acceptance at their next 
forthcoming annual exhibition, and that the President 
and Council regretted they were unable through want 
of space, &c., &c.”—and as much more as the reader 


1 “Encycl, Brit.,” ed. ix., art. “‘ Evolution,” p. 750. 
(&; 


18 Unconscious Memory 


chooses. I shall venture, therefore, to stick to it that the 
octogenarian was once a fish, or if Professor Huxley prefers 
it, ‘‘ an organism which must be classified among fishes.”’ 

But if a man was a fish once, he may have been a fish a 
million times over, for aught he knows; for he must 
admit that his conscious recollection is at fault, and has 
nothing whatever to do with the matter, which must be 
decided, not, as it were, upon his own evidence as to what 
deeds he may or may not recollect having executed, but by 
the production of -+his signatures in court, with satisfactory 
proof that he has delivered each document as his act and 
deed. 

This made things very much simpler. The processes of 
embryonic development, and instinctive actions, might 
be now seen as repetitions of the same kind of action by 
the same individual .in successive generations. It was 
natural, therefore, that they should come in the course of 
time to be done unconsciously, and a consideration of the 
most obvious facts of memory removed all further doubt 
that habit—which is based on memory—was at the bottom 
of all the phenomena of heredity. 

I had got to this point about the spring of 1874, and 
had begun to write, when I was compelled to go to Canada, 
and for the next year and a half did hardly any writing. 
The first passage in ‘‘ Life and Habit ’’ which I can date 
with certainty is the one on page 52, which runs as follows:— 


It is one against legion when a man tries to differ from 
his own past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ 
widely, so as to lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, 
and not to gratify them. It is more righteous in a man that 
he should “‘ eat strange food,” and that his cheek should “so 
much as lank not,’ than that he should starve if the strange 
food be at his command. His past selves are living in him at 
this moment with the accumulated life of centuries. ‘‘ Do this, 
this, this, which we too have done, and found our profit in it,” 
cry the souls of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far 
ones, coming and going as the sound of bells wafted on toa 
high mountain ; loud and clear are the near ones, urgent as an 
alarm of fire. 


How I wrote “ Life and Habit” . 19 


This was written a few days after my arrival in Canada, 
June 1874. I was on Montreal mountain for the first time, 
and was struck with its extreme beauty. It was a mag- 
nificent summer’s evening; the noble St. Lawrence 
flowed almost immediately beneath, and the vast expanse 
of country beyond it was suffused with a colour which even 
Italy cannot surpass. Sitting down for a while, I began 
making notes for ‘‘ Life and Habit,” of which I was then 
continually thinking, and had written the first few lines 
of the above, when the bells of Notre Dame in Montreal 
began to ring, and their sound was carried to and fro ina 
remarkably beautiful manner. I took advantage of the 
incident to insert then and there the last lines of the piece 
just quoted. I kept the whole passage with hardly any 
alteration, and am thus able to date it accurately. 

Though so occupied in Canada that writing a book was 
impossible, I nevertheless got many notes together for 
future use. I left Canada at the end of 1875, and early 
in 1876 began putting these notes into more coherent 
form. I did this in thirty pages of closely written matter, 
of which a pressed copy remains in my commonplace-book. 
I find two dates among them—the first, “‘ Sunday, Feb. 6. 
1876’ ; and the second, at the end of the notes, ““ Feb. 12. 
1876.” 

From these notes I find that by this time I had the 
theory contained in “ Life and Habit ’’ completely before 
me, with the four main principles which it involves, 
namely, the oneness of personality between parents and 
offspring ; memory on the part of offspring of certain 
actions which it did when in the persons of its forefathers ; 
the latency of that memory until it is rekindled by a 
recurrence of the associated ideas ; and the unconsciousness 
with which habitual actions come to be performed. 

The first half-page of these notes may serve as a sample, 
and runs thus :— 


Those habits and functions which we have in common 
with the lower animals come mainly within the womb, or are 


20 Unconscious Memory 


done involuntarily, as our [growth of] limbs, eyes, &c., and 
our power of digesting food, &c. . . 

We say of the chicken that it knows how to run about 
as soon as it is hatched, . but had it no knowledge before 
it was hatched ? 

It knew how to make a great many things before it was 
hatched. 

It grew eyes and feathers and bones. 

Yet we say it knew nothing about all this. 

After it is born it grows more feathers, and makes its 
bones larger, and develops a reproductive system. 

Again we say it knows nothing about all this. 

What then does it know ? 

Whatever it does not know so well as to be unconscious 
of knowing it. 

Knowledge dwells upon the confines of uncertainty. 

When we are very certain, we do not know that we 
know. When we will very strongly, we do not know that 
we will.”’ 


I then began my book, but considering myself still a 
painter by profession, I gave comparatively little time to 
writing, and got on but slowly. I left England for North 
Italy in the middle of May 1876 and returned early in 
August. It was perhaps thus that I failed to hear of the 
account of Professor Hering’s lecture given by Professor 
Ray Lankester in Nature, July 13, 1876; though, never 
at that time seeing Nature, I should probably have missed 
it under any circumstances. On my return I continued 
slowly writing. By August 1877 I considered that I had 
to all intents and purposes completed my book. My first 
proof bears date October 13, 1877. 

At this time I had not been able to find that anything 
like what I was advancing had been said already. I asked 
many friends, but not one of them knew of anything more 
than I did ; to them, as to me, it seemed an idea so new as 
to be almost preposterous ; but knowing how things turn 
up after one has written, of the existence of which one had 
not known before, I was particularly careful to guard 
against being supposed to claim originality. I neither 
claimed it nor wished for it ; for if a theory has any truth 


How I wrote “ Life and Habit” 21 


in it, it is almost sure to occur to several people much about 
the same time, and a reasonable person will look upon his 
work with great suspicion unless he can confirm it with 
the support of others who have gone before him. Still I 
knew of nothing in the least resembling it, and was so 
afraid of what I was doing, that though I could see no flaw 
in the argument, nor any loophole for escape from the 
conclusion it led to, yet I did not dare to put it forward 
with the seriousness and sobriety with which I should have 
treated the subject if I had not been in continual fear of a 
mine being sprung upon me from some unexpected quarter. 
I am exceedingly glad now that I knew nothing of Pro- 
fessor Hering’s lecture, for it is much better that two 
people should think a thing out as far as they can inde- 
pendently before they become aware of each other’s work ; 
but if I had seen it, I should either, as is most likely, not 
have written at all, or I should have pitched my book in 
another key. 

Among the additions I intended making while the book 
was in the press, was a chapter on Mr. Darwin’s provisional 
theory of Pangenesis, which I felt convinced must be right 
if it was Mr. Darwin’s, and which I was sure, if I could once 
understand it, must have an important bearing on “ Life 
and Habit.’ I had not as yet seen that the principle | 
was contending for was Darwinian, not Neo-Darwinian. 
My pages still teemed with allusions to “ natural selection,” 
and I sometimes allowed myself to hope that “ Life and 
Habit ’’ was going to be an adjunct to Darwinism which 
no one would welcome more gladly than Mr. Darwin 
himself. At this time I had a visit from a friend, who 
kindly called to answer a question of mine, relative, if I 
remember rightly, to ‘‘ Pangenesis.”’ He came, September 
26, 1877. One of the first things he said was, that the 
theory which had pleased him more than anything he had 
heard of for some time was one referring all life to memory. 
I said that was exactly what I was doing myself, and 
inquired where he had met with his theory. He replied 


2'2 Unconscious Memory 


that Professor Ray Lankester had written a letter about 
it in Nature some time ago, but he could not remember 
exactly when, and had given extracts from a lecture by 
Professor Ewald Hering, who had originated the theory. 
I said I should not look at it, as I had completed that part 
of my work, and was on the point of going to press. I 
could not recast my work if, as was most likely, I should 
find something, when I saw what Professor Hering had 
said, which would make me wish to rewrite my own book ; 
it was too late in the day and I did not feel equal to making 
any radical alteration ; and so the matter ended with very 
little said upon either side. I wrote, however, afterwards 
to my friend asking him to tell me the number of Nature 
which contained the lecture if he could find it, but he was 
unable to do so, and I was well enough content. 

A few days before this I had met another friend, and 
had explained to him what I was doing. He told me I 
ought to read Professor Mivart’s ‘‘ Genesis of Species,” 
and that if I did so I should find there were two sides to 
“natural selection.’”” Thinking, as so many people do— 
and no wonder—that “ natural selection ’’ and evolution 
were much the same thing, and having found so many 
attacks upon evolution produce no effect upon me, I 
declined to read it. I had as yet no idea that a writer 
could attack Neo-Darwinism without attacking evolution. 
But my friend kindly sent me a copy ; and when I read it, 
I found myself in the presence of arguments different from 
those I had met with hitherto, and did not see my way to 
answering them. I had, however, read only a small part 
of Professor Mivart’s work, and was not fully awake to 
the position, when the friend referred to in the preceding 
paragraph called on me. 

When I had finished the ‘ Genesis of Species,’”’ I felt 
that something was certainly wanted which should give a 
definite aim to the variations whose accumulation was to 
amount ultimately to specific and generic differences, and 
that without this there could have been no progress in 


How I wrote “ Life and Habit” 23 


organic development. I got the latest edition of the 
“Origin of Species ’’ in order to see how Mr. Darwin met 
Professor Mivart, and found his answers in many respects 
unsatisfactory. I had lost my original copy of the ‘‘ Origin 
of Species,’ and had not read the book for some years. 
I now set about reading it again, and came to the chapter 
on instinct, where I was horrified to find the following 
passage :— 

But it would be a serious error to suppose that the 
greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in 
one generation and then transmitted by inheritance to the 
succeeding generations. It can be clearly shown that the 
most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, 
namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not 
possibly have been acquired by habit. 


This showed that, according to Mr. Darwin, I had fallen 
into serious error, and my faith in him, though somewhat 
shaken, was far too great to be destroyed by a few days’ 
course of Professor Mivart, the full importance of whose 
work I had not yet apprehended. I continued to read, 
and when I had finished the chapter felt sure that I must 
indeed have been blundering. The concluding words, “ I 
am surprised that no one has hitherto advanced this 
demonstrative case of neuter insects against the well- 
known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by 
Lamarck,”2 were positively awful. There was a quiet 
consciousness of strength about them which was more 
convincing than any amount of more detailed explanation. 
This was the first I had heard of any doctrine of inherited 
habit as having been propounded by Lamarck (the passage 
stands in the first edition, “‘ the well-known doctrine of 
Lamarck,” p. 242); and now to find that I had been only 
busying myself with a stale theory of this long-since 
exploded charlatan—with my book three parts written 
and already in the press—it was a serious scare. 

On reflection, however, I was again met with the over- 


1 “ Origin of Species,’’ 6th ed., 1876, p. 206. 2 Ibid., p. 233. 


24 Unconscious Memory 


whelming weight of the evidence in favour of structure and 
habit being mainly due to memory. I accordingly gathered 
as much as I could second-hand of what Lamarck had said, 
reserving a study of his ‘“‘ Philosophie Zoologique ’’ for 
another occasion, and read as much about ants and bees 
as I could find in readily accessible works. In a few days 
I saw my way again; and now, reading the “ Origin of 
Species ’’ more closely, and I may say more sceptically, 
the antagonism between Mr. Darwin and Lamarck became 
fully apparent to me, and I saw how incoherent and 
unworkable in practice the later view was in comparison 
with the earlier. Then I read Mr. Darwin’s answers to 
miscellaneous objections, and was met, and this time 
brought up, by the passage beginning “In the earlier 
editions of this work,’’! &c., on which I wrote very severely 
in “ Life and Habit’? for I felt by this time that the 
difference of opinion between us was radical, and that the 
matter must be fought out according to the rules of the 
game. After this I went through the earlier part of my 
book, and cut out the expressions which I had used in- 
advertently, and which were inconsistent with a teleo- 
logical view. This necessitated only verbal alterations ; 
for, though I had not known it, the spirit of the book was 
throughout teleological. 

I now saw that I had got my hands full, and abandoned 
my intention of touching upon “‘ Pangenesis.”’ I took up 
the words of Mr. Darwin quoted above, to the effect that 
it would be a serious error to ascribe the greater number 
of instincts to transmitted habit. I wrote chapter xi. of 
“ Life and Habit,” which is headed “ Instincts as Inherited 
Memory’; I also wrote the four subsequent .chapters, 
“ Instincts of Neuter Insects,”’ ‘‘ Lamarck and Mr. Darwin,” 
“Mr. Mivart and Mr. Darwin,’’ and the concluding chapter, 
all of them in the month of October and the early part of 
November 1877, the complete book leaving the binder’s 


* “ Origin of Species,’’ 6th ed} Pl 7ls 1970: 
2 pp. 258-260. 


How I wrote “‘Life and Habit” 25 


hands December 4, 1877, but, according to trade custom, 
being dated 1878. It will be seen that these five concluding 
chapters were rapidly written, and this may account in 
part for the directness with which I said anything I had 
to say about Mr. Darwin; partly this, and partly I felt I 
was in for a penny and might as well be in for a pound. 
~ I therefore wrote about Mr. Darwin’s work exactly as I 
should about any one else’s, bearing in mind the inestimable 
services he had undoubtedly—and must always be counted 
to have—rendered to evolution. 


Chapter II] 


How I came to write ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New ’’—Mr. 
Darwin’s “ brief but imperfect ”’ sketch of the opinions of 
the writers on evolution who had preceded him—The 
reception which ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New ”’ met with. 


HOUGH my book was out in 1877, it was not till 
January 1878 that I took an opportunity of looking 
up Professor Ray Lankester’s account of Professor Hering’s 
lecture. I can hardly say how relieved I was to find that it 
sprung no mine upon me, but that, so far as I could gather, 
Professor Hering and I had come to pretty much the 
same conclusion. I had already found the passage in Dr. 
Erasmus Darwin which I quoted in “‘ Evolution, Old and 
New,’ but may perhaps as well repeat it here. It runs— 
Owing to the imperfection of language, the offspring 
is termed a new animal ; but is, in truth, a branch or elonga- 
tion of the parent, since a part of the embryon animal is or 
was a part of the parent, and, therefore, in strict language, 
cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production, 
and, therefore, it may retain some of the habits of the parent 
system.! 

When, then, the Atheneum reviewed “‘ Life and Habit ”’ 
(January 26, 1878), I took the opportunity to write to that 
paper, calling attention to Professor Hering’s lecture, and 
also to the passage just quoted from Dr. Erasmus Darwin. 
The editor kindly inserted my letter in his issue of February 
g, 1878. I felt that I had now done all in the way of 
acknowledgment to Professor Hering which it was, for the 
time, in my power to do. 

I again took up Mr. Darwin’s “‘ Origin of Species,”’ this 

* “ Zoonomia, ’’vol.i. p. 484; ‘ Evolution, Old and New,” p. 254: 
26 


How I wrote ‘‘ Evolution,” etc. 27 


time, I admit, in a spirit of scepticism. I read his “ brief 
but imperfect ’’ sketch of the progress of opinion on the 
origin of species, and turned to each one of the writers he 
had mentioned. First, I read all the parts of the “ Zoo- 
nomia,” that were not purely medical, and was astonished 
to find that, as Dr. Krause has since said in his essay on 
Erasmus Darwin, “ he was the first who proposed and per- 
sistently carried out a well-rounded theory with regard to the 
development of the living world”? } (italics in original). 

This is undoubtedly the case, and I was surprised at 
finding Professor Huxley say concerning this very eminent 
man that he could ‘“‘ hardly be said to have made any 
real advance upon his predecessors.” Still more was I 
surprised at remembering that, in the first edition of 
the “ Origin of Species,’ Dr. Erasmus Darwin had never 
been so much as named; while in the “ brief but im- 
perfect ”’ sketch he was dismissed with a line of half- 
contemptuous patronage, as though the mingled tribute 
of admiration and curiosity which attaches to scientific 
prophecies, as distinguished from discoveries, was the 
utmost he was entitled to. ‘“‘It is curious,’ says Mr. 
Darwin innocently, in the middle of a note in the smallest 
possible type, ‘“‘ how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous grounds of 
opinion of Lamarck in his ‘ Zoonomia ’ (vol. 1. pp. 500-510), 
published in 1794’; this was all he had to say about the 
founder of ‘‘ Darwinism,” until I myself unearthed Dr. 
Erasmus Darwin, and put his work fairly before the present 
generation in “ Evolution, Old and New.” Six months after 
I had done this, I had the satisfaction of seeing that Mr. 
Darwin had woke up to the propriety of doing much the 
same thing, and that he had published an interesting and 
charmingly written memoir of his grandfather, of which 
more anon. 

Not that Dr. Darwin was the first to catch sight of a 
complete theory of evolution. Buffon was the first to point 

1 ‘“‘Rrasmus Darwin,’’ by Ernst Krause, p. 211, London, 1879. 


28 Unconscious Memory 


out that, in view of the known modifications which had 
been effected among our domesticated animals and culti- 
vated plants, the ass and the horse should be considered 
as, in all probability, descended from a common ancestor ; 
yet, if this is so, he writes—if the point ‘‘ were once gained 
that among animals and vegetables there had been, I do 
not say several species, but even a single one, which had 
been produced in the course of direct descent from another 
species ; if, for example, it could be once shown that the 
ass was but a degéneration from the horse, then there is 
no further limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we 
should not be wrong in supposing that, with sufficient time, 
she has evolved all other organised forms from one primor- 
dial type ”’ 4 (et Von n’auroit pas tort de supposer, que d’un 
seul étre elle a su tivey avec le temps tous les autres étres 
organtsés). 

This, I imagine, in spite of Professor Huxley’s dictum, 
is contributing a good deal to the general doctrine of evolu- 
tion ; for though Descartes and Leibnitz may have thrown 
out hints pointing more or less broadly in the direction of 
evolution, some of which Professor Huxley has quoted, 
he has adduced nothing approaching to the passage from 
Buffon given above, either in respect of the clearness with 
which the conclusion intended to be arrived at is pointed 
out, or the breadth of view with which the whole ground 
of animal and vegetable nature is covered. The passage 
referred to is only one of many to the same effect, and 
must be connected with one quoted in “ Evolution, Old 
and New,” # from p. 13 of Buffon’s first volume, which 
appeared in 1749, and than which nothing can well point 
more plainly in the direction of evolution. It is not easy, 
therefore, to understand why Professor Huxley should 
give 1753-78 as the date of Buffon’s work, nor yet why he 
should say that Buffon was “at first a partisan of the 


* See “Evolution, Old and New,” p. 91, and Buffon, tom. iv. 


Pp. 383, ed. 1753. 
? “ Evolution, Old and New,” p. 104. 


How I wrote “ Evolution,” etc. 29 


absolute immutability of species,’ + unless, indeed, we 
suppose he has been content to follow that very unsatis- 
factory writer, Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire (who falls into 
this error, and says that Buffon’s first volume on animals 
appeared 1753), without verifying him, and without 
making any reference to him. 

Professor Huxley quotes a passage from the “ Palin- 
génésie Philosophique ”’ of Bonnet, of which he says that, 
making allowance for his peculiar views on the subject of 
generation, they bear no small resemblance to what 1s 
understood by ‘“‘ evolution’ at the present day. The most 
important parts of the passage quoted are as follows :— 


Should I be going too far if I were to conjecture that 
the plants and animals of the present day have arisen by a 
sort of natural evolution from the organised beings which 
peopled the world in its original state as it left the hands of 
the Creator? ... In the outset organised beings were 
probably very different from what they are now—as different 
as the original world is from our present one. We have no 
means of estimating the amount of these differences, but it 
is possible that even our ablest naturalists, if transplanted to 
the original world, would entirely fail to recognise our plants 
and animals therein. ? 


But this is feeble in comparison with Buffon, and did 
not appear till 1769, when Buffon had been writing on 
evolution for fully twenty years with the eyes of scientific 
Europe upon him. Whatever concession to the opinion of 
Buffon Bonnet may have been inclined to make in 17609, in 
1764, when he published his ‘‘ Contemplation de la Nature,’’ 
and in 1762 when his ‘“‘ Considérations sur les Corps 
Organisés ” appeared, he cannot be considered to have 
been a supporter of evolution. I went through these works 
in 1878 when I was writing ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” 
to see whether I could claim him as on my side; but 

Meiencycl, Brit.,.-oth ed.:art.,) 1: Evolution,’ p. 748. 


2 “ Palingénésie Philosophique,” part x. chap. il, (quoted from 
Professor Huxley’s article on ‘‘ Evolution,”’ ‘““Encycl; Brit.,”’ oth ed., 


P- 745). 


30 Unconscious Memory 


though frequently delighted with his work, I found it 
impossible to press him into my service. 

The pre-eminent claim of Buffon to be considered as 
the father of the modern doctrine of evolution cannot be 
reasonably disputed, though he was doubtless led to his 
conclusions by the works of Descartes and Leibnitz, of 
both of whom he was an avowed and very warm admirer. 
His claim does not rest upon a passage here or there, but 
upon the spirit of forty quartos written over a period of 
about as many years. Nevertheless he wrote, as I have 
shown in “ Evolution, Old and New,’ of set purpose 
enigmatically, whereas there was no beating about the 
bush with Dr. Darwin. He speaks straight out, and Dr. 
Krause is justified in saying of him “ that he was the first 
who proposed and persistently carried out a well-rounded 
theory ’’ of evolution. 

I now turned to Lamarck. I read the first volume of 
the “ Philosophie Zoologique,” analysed it and translated 
the most important parts. The second volume was beside 
my purpose, dealing as it does rather with the origin of 
life than of species, and travelling too fast and too far for 
me to be able to keep up with him. Again I was astonished 
at the little mention Mr. Darwin had made of this illus- 
trious writer, at the manner in which he had motioned 
him away, as it were, with his hand in the first edition of 
the “ Origin of Species,’’ and at the brevity and imperfec- 
tion of the remarks made upon him in the subsequent 
historical sketch. 

I got Isidore Geoffroy’s ‘‘ Histoire Naturelle Générale,” 
which Mr. Darwin commends in the note on the second 
page of the historical sketch, as giving ‘‘ an excellent 
history of opinion’ upon the subject of evolution, and a 
full account of Buffon’s conclusions upon the same subject. 
This at least is what I supposed Mr. Darwin to mean. 
What he said was that Isidore Geoffroy gives an excellent 
history of opinion on the subject of the date of the first 
publication of Lamarck, and that in his work there is a 


How I wrote “ Evolution,” etc. 31 


full account of Buffon’s fluctuating conclusions upon the 
same subject.) But Mr. Darwin is a more than commonly 
_ puzzling writer. I read what M. Geoffroy had to say upon 
Buffon, and was surprised to find that, after all, according 
to M. Geoffroy, Buffon, and not Lamarck, was the founder 
of the theory of evolution. His name, as I have already 
said, was never mentioned in the first edition of the ‘ Origin 
Of Species.” 

M. Geoffroy goes into the accusations of having fluctuated 
in his opinions, which he tells us have been brought against 
Buffon, and comes to the conclusion that they are unjust, 
as any one else will do who turns to Buffon himself. Mr. 
Darwin, however, in the “ brief but imperfect sketch,” 
catches at the accusation, and repeats it while saying 
nothing whatever about the defence. The following is 
still all he says: “‘ The first author who in modern times 
has treated ”’ evolution “in a scientific spirit was Buffon. 
But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, 
and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the 
transformation of species, I need not here enter on details.” 
On the next page, in the note last quoted, Mr. Darwin 
originally repeated the accusation of Buffon’s having been 
fluctuating in his opinions, and appeared to give it the im- 
primatur of Isidore Geoffroy’s approval ; the fact being that 
Isidore Geoffroy only quoted the accusation in order to 
refute it; and though, I suppose, meaning well, did not 
make half the case he might have done, and abounds with 
misstatements. My readers will find this matter particu- 
larly dealt with in ‘ Evolution, Old and New,” chapter X. 

I gather that some one must have complained to Mr. 
Darwin of his saying that Isidore Geoffroy gave an account 
of Buffon’s “ fluctuating conclusions ’”’ concerning evolu- 


1 The note began thus: ‘‘I have taken the date of the first 
publication of Lamarck from Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s (‘‘ Hist. 
Nat. Générale,’”’ tom. ii. p. 405, 1859) excellent history of opinion 
upon this subject. In this work a full account is given of Buffon’s 
fluctuating conclusions upon the same subject.”—“ Origin of 
Species,” 3rd. ed., 1861, p. xiv. 


B2 Unconscious Memory 


tion, when he was doing all he knew to maintain that 
Buffon’s conclusions did not fluctuate ; for I see that in 
the edition of 1876 the word “ fluctuating ’’ has dropped 
out of the note in question, and we now learn that Isidore 
Geoffroy gives “‘a full account of Buffon’s conclusions,”’ 
without the “ fluctuating.’’ But Buffon has not taken 
much by this, for his opinions are still left fluctuating 
greatly at different periods on the preceding page, and 
though he still was the first to treat evolution in a scientific 
spirit, he still does not enter upon the causes or means of 
the transformation of species. No one can understand Mr. 
Darwin who does not collate the different editions of the 
‘“ Origin of Species ’’ with some attention. When he has 
done this, he will know what Newton meant by saying 
he felt like a child playing with pebbles upon the seashore. 

One word more upon this note before I leave it. Mr. 
Darwin speaks of Isidore Geoffroy’s history of opinion as 
“excellent,” and his account of Buffon’s opinions as 
“ full.”” I wonder how well qualified he is to be a judge 
of these matters? If he knows much about the earlier 
writers, he is the more inexcusable for having said so little 
about them. If little, what is his opinion worth ? 

To return to the “ brief but imperfect sketch.” I do 
not think I can ever again be surprised at anything Mr. 
Darwin may say or do, but if I could, I should wonder how 
a writer who did not “ enter upon the causes or means of 
the transformation of species,’ and whose opinions 
“fluctuated greatly at different periods,’ can be held to 
have treated evolution “ in a scientific spirit.”’ Neverthe- 
less, when I reflect upon the scientific reputation Mr. 
Darwin has attained, and the means by which he has won 
it, I suppose the scientific spirit must be much what he 
here implies. I see Mr. Darwin says of his own father, 
Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury, that he does not 
consider him to have had a scientific mind. Mr. Darwin 
cannot tell why he does not think his father’s mind to 
have been fitted for advancing science, “‘ for he was fond 


How I wrote “ Evolution,” etc. 33 


of theorising, and was incomparably the best observer ” 
Mr. Darwin ever knew.! From the hint given in the 
“brief but imperfect sketch,” I fancy I can help Mr. 
Darwin to see why he does not think his father’s mind to 
have been a scientific one. It is possible that Dr. Robert 
Darwin’s opinions did not fluctuate sufficiently at different 
periods, and that Mr. Darwin considered him as having 
in some way entered upon the causes or means of the 
transformation of species. Certainly those who read Mr. 
Darwin’s own works attentively will find no lack of fluctua- 
tion in his case ; and reflection will show them that a theory 
of evolution which relies mainly on the accumulation of 
accidental variations comes very close to not entering upon 
the causes or means of the transformation of species.? 

I have shown, however, in ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” 
that the assertion that Buffon does not enter on the causes 
or means of the transformation of species is absolutely 
without foundation, and that, on the contrary, he is 
continually dealing with this very matter, and devotes 
to it one of his longest and most important chapters,?® 
but I admit that he is less satisfactory on this head than 
either Dr. Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck. 

As a matter of fact, Buffon is much more of a Neo- 
Darwinian than either Dr. Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck, 
for with him the variations are sometimes fortuitous. 
In the case of the dog, he speaks of them as making their 
appearance ‘‘by some chance common enough with 
Nature,’ 4 and being perpetuated by man’s selection. 
This is exactly the “if any slight favourable variation 
happen to arise” of Mr. Charles Darwin. Buffon also 
speaks of the variations among pigeons arising par 
hasard.’’ But these expressions are only slips; his main 
cause of the variation is the direct action of changed condi- 


1 “ Life of Erasmus Darwin,” pp. 84, 85. 

2 See “ Life and Habit,” p. 264 and pp. 276, 277. 
8 See ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” pp. 159-165. 
“ Ibid., p. 122. 


34 Unconscious Memory 


tions of existence, while with Dr. Erasmus Darwin and 
Lamarck the action of the conditions of existence is in- 
direct, the direct action being that of the animals or plants 
themselves, in consequence of changed sense of need under 
changed conditions. 

I should say that the sketch so often referred to is at 
first sight now no longer imperfect in Mr. Darwin’s opinion. 
It was “‘ brief but imperfect ’’ in 1861 and in 1866, but in 
1876 I see that it is brief only. Of course, discovering that 
it was no longer imperfect, I expected to find it briefer. 
What, then, was my surprise at finding that it had become 
rather longer? JI have found no perfectly satisfactory 
explanation of this inconsistency, but, on the whole, 
incline to think that the “ greatest of living men ”’ felt him- 
self unequal to prolonging his struggle with the word “ but,”’ 
and resolved to lay that conjunction at all hazards, even 
though the doing so might cost him the balance of his 
adjectives; for I think he must know that his sketch is 
still imperfect. 

From Isidore Geoffroy I turned to Buffon himself, and 
had not long to wait before I felt that I was now brought — 
into communication with the master-mind of all those 
who have up to the present time busied themselves 
with evolution. For a brief and imperfect sketch of 
him I must refer my readers to “ Evolution, Old and 
New.” 

I have no great respect for the author of the “ Vestiges 
of Creation,’’ who behaved hardly better to the writers 
upon whom his own work was founded than Mr. Darwin 
himself has done. Nevertheless, I could not forget the 
gravity of the misrepresentation with which he was 
assailed on page 3 of the first edition of the “ Origin of 
Species,’ nor impugn the justice of his rejoinder in the 
following year, when he replied that it was to be regretted 
Mr. Darwin had read his work ‘“‘ almost as much amiss as 
if, like its declared opponents, he had an interest in mis- 

1 See “‘ Evolution, Old and New,” pp. 247, 248. 


How I wrote ‘‘ Evolution,” etc. 35 


representing it.””1 I could not, again, forget that, though 
Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by the passage in 
question, it was expunged without a word of apology or 
explanation of how it was that he had come to write it. 
A writer with any claim to our consideration will never 
fall into serious error about another writer without hasten- 
ing to make a public apology as soon as he becomes aware 
of what he has done. 

Reflecting upon the substance of what I have written in 
the last few pages, I thought it right that people should 
have a chance of knowing more about the earlier writers 
on evolution than they were likely to hear from any of our 
leading scientists (no matter how many lectures they may 
give on the coming of age of the “ Origin of Species ’’) 
except Professor Mivart. A book pointing the difference 
between teleological and non-teleological views of evolution 
seemed likely to be useful, and would afford me the oppor- 
tunity I wanted for giving a résumé of the views of each 
one of the three chief founders of the theory, and of con- 
trasting them with those of Mr. Charles Darwin, as well as 
for calling attention to Professor Hering’s lecture. I 
accordingly wrote “‘ Evolution, Old and New,” which 
was prominently announced in the leading literary periodi- 
cals at the end of February, or on the very first days of 
March 1879,” as “a comparison of the theories of Buffon, 
Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with that of Mr. 
Charles Darwin, with copious extracts from the works 
of the three first-named writers.”’ In this book I was 
hardly able to conceal the fact that, in spite of the obliga- 
tions under which we must always remain to Mr. Darwin, 
I had lost my respect for him and for his work. 

I should point out that this announcement, coupled with 
what I had written in “ Life and Habit,’’ would enable 
Mr. Darwin and his friends to form a pretty shrewd guess 


1 “* Vestiges of Creation,’’ ed. 1860, ‘‘ Proofs, illustrations, &c.,’’ 
p. lxiv. 
2 The first announcement was in the Examiner, February 22,1879. 


36 Unconscious Memory 


as to what I was likely to say, and to quote from Dr. 
Erasmus Darwin in my forthcoming book. The announce- 
ment, indeed, would tell almost as much as the book itself 
to those who knew the works of Erasmus Darwin. 

As may be supposed, “ Evolution, Old and New,” met 
with a very unfavourable reception at the hands of many 
of its reviewers. The Saturday Review was furious. 
“When a writer,’ it exclaimed, “‘ who has not given as 
many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years, 
is not content to air his own crude though clever fallacies, 
but assumes to criticise Mr. Darwin with the supercilious- 
ness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy’s theme, 
it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves 
or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was 
the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. 
Darwin the pert speculator who takes all his facts at 
second-hand.” } | 

The lady or gentleman who writes in such a strain as 
this should not be too hard upon others whom she or he 
may consider to write like schoolmasters. It is true I have 
travelled—not much, but still as much as many others, and 
have endeavoured to keep my eyes open to the facts 
before me ; but I cannot think that I made any reference to 
my travels in “ Evolution, Old and New.’ I did not quite 
see what that had to do with the matter. A man may get 
to know a good deal without ever going beyond the four- 
mile radius from Charing Cross. Much less did I imply 
that Mr. Darwin was pert: pert is one of the last words 
that can be applied to Mr. Darwin. Nor, again, had I 
blamed him for taking his facts at second-hand ; no one is 
to be blamed for this, provided he takes well-established 
facts and acknowledges his sources. Mr. Darwin has 
generally gone to good sources. The ground of complaint 
against him is that he muddied the water after he had 
drawn it, and tacitly claimed to be the rightful owner of 
the spring, on the score of the damage he had effected. 

1 Saturday Review, May 31, 1879. 


How I wrote “‘ Evolution,” etc. 37 


Notwithstanding, however, the generally hostile, or 
more or less contemptuous, reception which “ Evolution, 
Old and New,” met with, there were some reviews—as, 
for example, those in the Field,1 the Daily Chronicle,” 
the Atheneum, the Journal of Science,* the British Journal 
of Homeopathy,® the Daily News,® the Popular Science 
Review 7—which were all I could expect or wish. 


IMay 26,1879 *# May 31,1879 3 July 26,1879. 4 July 1879. 
5July 13879. 6 July 29, 1379. 7 January 1880. 


Chapter IV 


The manner in which Mr. Darwin met ‘‘ Evolution, 
Old and New.” 


Y far the most important notice of ‘‘ Evolution, Old 
and New,” was that taken by Mr. Darwin himself ; 
for I can hardly be mistaken in believing that Dr. Krause’s 
article would have been allowed to repose unaltered in the 
pages of the well-known German scientific journal, Kosmos, 
unless something had happened to make Mr. Darwin feel 
that his reticence concerning his grandfather must now 
be ended. 

Mr. Darwin, indeed, gives me the impression of wishing 
me to understand that this is not the case. At the beginning 
of this year he wrote to me, in a letter which I will presently 
give in full, that he had obtained Dr. Krause’s consent for 
a translation, and had arranged with Mr. Dallas, before 
my book was “announced.” ‘‘I remember this,” he 
continues, “‘ because Mr. Dallas wrote to tell me of the 
advertisement.’’ But Mr. Darwin is not a clear writer, 
and it is impossible to say whether he is referring to the 
announcement of “‘ Evolution, Old and New ’—in which 
case he means that the arrangements for the translation 
of Dr. Krause’s article were made before the end of Feb- 
ruary 1879, and before any public intimation could have 
reached him as to the substance of the book on which 
I was then engaged—or to the advertisements of its being 
now published, which appeared at the beginning of May ; 
in which case, as I have said above, Mr. Darwin and his 
friends had for some time had full opportunity of knowing 
what I was about. I believe, however, Mr. Darwin to 


38 


Mr. Darwin and ‘ Evolution,” etc. 39 


intend that he remembered the arrangements having been 
made before the beginning of May—his use of the word 
‘“‘ announced,” instead of “‘ advertised,” being an accident ; 
but let this pass. 

Some time after Mr. Darwin’s work appeared in Novem- 
ber 1879, I got it, and looking at the last page of the book, 
I read as follows :— 

They (the elder Darwin and Lamarck) explain the 
adaptation to purpose of organisms by an obscure impulse 
or sense of what is purpose-like ; yet even with regard to 
man we are in the habit of saying, that one can never know 
what so-and-so is good for. The purpose-like 1s that which 
approves itself, and not always that which is struggled for by 


obscure impulses and desires. Just in the same way the beautt- 
ful is what pleases. 


I had a sort of feeling as though the writer of the above 
might have had “ Evolution, Old and New,” in his mind, 
but went on to the next sentence, which ran— 


Erasmus Darwin’s system was in itself a most significant 
first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has 
opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the present day, 
as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weakness 
of thought and a mental anachronism which no one can 
envy. 

“That’s me,” said I to myself promptly. I noticed 
also the position in which the sentence stood, which made 
it both one of the first that would be likely to catch a 
reader’s eye, and the last he would carry away with him. 
I therefore expected to find an open reply to some parts of 
“Evolution, Old and New,” and turned to Mr. Darwin’s 
preface. 

To my surprise, I there found that what I had been 
reading could not by any possibility refer to me, for the 
preface ran as follows :— 


In the February number of a well-known German scientific 
journal, Kosmos,! Dr. Ernest Krause published a sketch of 


1 How far Kosmos was a “ well-known” journal, I cannot 
determine. It had just entered upon its second year. 


40 Unconscious Memory 


the ‘‘ Life of Erasmus Darwin,” the author of the ‘‘ Zoonomia,”’ 
** Botanic Garden,’’ and other works: This article bears the 
title of a ‘‘ Contribution to the History of the Descent Theory ”’ ; 
and Dr. Krause has kindly allowed my brother Erasmus and 
myself to have a translation made of it for publication in this 
country. 


Then came a note as follows :— 


Mr. Dallas has undertaken the translation, and _ his 
scientific reputation, together with his knowledge of German, 
is a guarantee for its accuracy. 


I ought to have suspected inaccuracy where I found so 
much consciousness of accuracy, but I did not. However 
this may be, Mr. Darwin pins himself down with every 
circumstance of preciseness to giving Dr. Krause’s article 
as it appeared in Kosmos,—the whole article, and nothing 
but the article. No one could know this better than Mr. 
Darwin. 

On the second page of Mr. Darwin’s preface there is a 
small-type note saying that my work, ‘“‘ Evolution, Old 
and New,” had appeared since the publication of Dr. 
Krause’s article. Mr. Darwin thus distinctly precludes 
his readers from supposing that any passage they might 
meet with could have been written in reference to, or by 
the light of, my book. If anything appeared condemnatory 
of that book, it was an undesigned coincidence, and would 
show how little worthy of consideration I must be when 
my opinions were refuted in advance by one who could 
have no bias in regard to them. 

Knowing that if the article I was about to read appeared 
in February, it must have been published before my book, 
which was not out till three months later, I saw nothing 
in Mr. Darwin’s preface to complain of, and felt that this 
was only another instance of my absurd vanity having led 
me to rush to conclusions without sufficient grounds,— 
as if it was likely, indeed, that Mr. Darwin should think 
what I had said of sufficient importance to be affected by 
it. It was plain that some one besides myself, of whom I 


Mr. Darwin and ‘“‘ Evolution,” etc. 41 


as yet knew nothing, had been writing about the elder 
Darwin, and had taken much the same line concerning 
him that I had done. It was for the benefit of this person, 
then, that Dr. Krause’s paragraph was intended. I 
returned to a becoming sense of my own insignificance, 
and began to read what I supposed to be an accurate 
translation of Dr. Krause’s article as it originally appeared, 
before ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” was published. 

On pp. 3 and 4 of Dr. Krause’s part of Mr. Darwin's 
book (pp. 133 and 134 of the book itself), I detected a sub- 
apologetic tone which a little surprised me, and a notice 
of the fact that Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet had 
used the word “ Darwinising.” Mr. R. Garnett had called 
my attention to this, and I had mentioned it in “ Evolution, 
Old and New,” but the paragraph only struck me as being 
a little odd. 

When I got a few pages farther on (p. 147 of Mr. 
Darwin’s book), I found a long quotation from Buffon 
about rudimentary organs, which I had quoted in “ Evolu- 
tion, Old and New.” I observed that Dr. Krause used the 
same edition of Buffon that I did, and began his quota- 
tion two lines from the beginning of Buffon’s paragraph, 
exactly as I had done; also that he had taken his nomi- 
native from the omitted part of the sentence across a 
full stop, as I had myself taken it. A little lower I found 
a line of Buffon’s omitted which I had given, but I found 
that at that place I had inadvertently left two pair of 
inverted commas which ought to have come out,! hav- 
ing intended to end my quotation, but changed my 
mind and continued it without erasing the commas. It 
seemed to me that these commas had bothered Dr. Krause, 
and made him think it safer to leave something out, for the 
line he omits is a very good one. I noticed that he trans- 
lated ‘“‘ Mais comme nous voulons toujours tout rapporter 
4 un certain but,” ‘‘ But we, always wishing to refer,” &c., 
while I had it, “‘ But we, ever on the look-out to refer,”’ 


1 “ Evolution, Old and New,”’’ p. 120, line 5. 


4.2 Unconscious Memory 


&c. ; and “‘ Nous ne faisons pas attention que nous altérons 
la philosophie,”’ ‘‘ We fail to see that thus we deprive 
philosophy of her true character,’ whereas I had “‘ We fail 
to see that we thus rob philosophy of her true character.” 
This last was too much ; and though it might turn out that 
Dr. Krause had quoted this passage before I had done so, 
had used the same edition as I had, had begun two lines 
from the beginning of a paragraph as I had done, and that 
the later resemblances were merely due to Mr. Dallas 
having compared Dr. Krause’s German translation of 
Buffon with my English, and very properly made use of it 
when he thought fit, it looked frimda facie more as though 
my quotation had been copied in English as it stood, and 
then altered, but not quite altered enough. This, in the 
face of the preface, was incredible ; but so many points 
had such an unpleasant aspect, that I thought it better to 
send for Kosmos and see what I could make out. 

At this time I knew not one word of German. On the 
same day, therefore, that I sent for Kosmos I began to 
acquire that language, and in the fortnight before Kosmos 
came had got far enough forward for all practical purposes 
—that is to say, with the help of a translation and a diction- 
ary, I could see whether or no a German passage was the 
Same as what purported to be its translation. 

When Kosmos came I turned to the end of the article 
to see how the sentence about mental anachronism and 
weakness of thought looked in German. I found nothing 
of the kind, the original article ended with some innocent 
thyming doggerel about somebody going on and exploring 
something with eagle eye; but ten lines from the end I 
found a sentence which corresponded with one six pages 
from the end of the English translation. After this there 
could be little doubt that the whole of these last six English 
pages were spurious matter. What little doubt remained 
was afterwards removed by my finding that they had no 
place in any part of the genuine article. I looked for the 
passage about Coleridge’s using the word “‘ Darwinising ”’ ; 


Mr. Darwin and “Evolution,” etc. 43 


it was not to be found in the German. I looked for the 
piece I had quoted from Buffon about rudimentary organs ; 
but there was nothing of it, nor indeed any reference to 
Buffon. It was plain, therefore, that the article which 
Mr. Darwin had given was not the one he professed to be 
giving. I read Mr. Darwin’s preface over again to see 
whether he left himself any loophole. There was not a chink 
or cranny through which escape was possible. The only in- 
ference that could be drawn was either that some one had 
imposed upon Mr. Darwin, or that Mr. Darwin, although it 
was not possible to suppose him ignorant of the interpola- 
tions that had been made, nor of the obvious purpose of 
the concluding sentence, had nevertheless palmed off an 
article which had been added to and made to attack 
‘“‘ Evolution, Old and New,” as though it were the original 
article which appeared before that book was written. I 
could not and would not believe that Mr. Darwin had 
condescended to this. Nevertheless, I saw it was necessary 
to sift the whole matter, and began to compare the German 
and the English articles paragraph by paragraph. 

On the first page I found a passage omitted from the 
English, which with great labour I managed to get through, 
and can now translate as follows :— 


Alexander Von Humboldt used to take pleasure in 
recounting how powerfully Forster’s pictures of the South 
Sea Islands and St. Pierre’s illustrations of Nature had 
provoked his ardour for travel and influenced his career as a 
scientific imvestigator. How much more impressively must 
the works of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, with their reiterated fore- 
shadowing of a more lofty interpretation of Nature, have 
affected his grandson, who in his youth assuredly approached 
them with the devotion due to the works of a renowned poet.’ 


I then came upon a passage common to both German 
and English, which in its turn was followed in the English 
by the sub-apologetic paragraph which I had been struck 
with on the first reading, and which was not in the German, 


1 Kosmos, February 1879, p. 397. 


A4 Unconscious Memory 


its place being taken by a much longer passage which had 
no place in the English. A little farther on I was amused 
at coming upon the following, and at finding it wholly 
transformed in the supposed accurate translation :— 


How must this early and penetrating explanation of 
rudimentary organs have affected the grandson when he 
read the poem of his ancestor! But indeed the biological 
remarks of this accurate observer in regard to certain definite 
natural objects must have produced a still deeper impression 
upon him, pointing, as they do, to questions which have 
attained so great a prominence at the present day; such as, 
Why is any creature anywhere such as we actually see it, 
and nothing else ? Why has such and such a plant poisonous 
juices ? Why has such and such another thorns ? Why have 
birds and fishes light-coloured breasts and dark backs, and, 
Why does every creature resemble the one from which it 
sprung ?} 


I will not weary the reader with further details as to 
the omissions from and additions to the German text. 
Let it suffice that the so-called translation begins on p. 131 
and ends on p. 216 of Mr. Darwin’s book. There is new 
matter on each one of the pp. 132-139, while almost the 
whole of pp. 147-152 inclusive, and the whole of pp. 211- 
216 inclusive, are spurious—that is to say, not what they 
purport to be, not translations from an article that was 
published in February 1879, and before “‘ Evolution, Old 
and New,” but interpolations not published till six months 
after that book. 

Bearing in mind the contents of two of the added 
passages and the tenor of the concluding sentence quoted 
above,? I could no longer doubt that the article had been 
altered by the light of and with a view to ‘‘ Evolution, 
Old and New.” 

The steps are perfectly clear. First Dr. Krause pub- 
lished his article in Kosmos and my book was announced 
(its purport being thus made obvious), both in the month 


* Kosmos, February 1879, p. 404. 
2 Page 39 of this volume. 


Mr. Darwin and “Evolution,” etc. 45 


of February 1879. Soon afterwards arrangements were 
made for a translation of Dr. Krause’s essay, and were 
completed by the end of April. Then my book came out, 
and in some way or other Dr. Krause happened to get hold 
of it. He helped himself—not to much, but to enough ; 
made what other additions to and omissions from his 
article he thought would best meet “‘ Evolution, Old and 
New,” and then fell to condemning that book in a finale 
that was meant to be crushing. Nothing was said about 
the revision which Dr. Krause’s work had undergone, but 
it was expressly and particularly declared in the preface 
that the English translation was an accurate version of 
what appeared in the February number of Kosmos, and 
no less expressly and particularly stated that my book 
was published subsequently to this. Both these state- 
ments are untrue; they are in Mr. Darwin’s favour and 
prejudicial to myself. 

All this was done with that well-known “ happy sim- 
plicity ’ of which the Pall Mall Gazette, December 12, 
1879, declared that Mr. Darwin was “a master.” The 
final sentence, about the “‘ weakness of thought and mental 
anachronism which no one can envy,’ was especially 
successful. The reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette just 
quoted from gave it in full, and said that it was thoroughly 
justified. He then mused forth a general gnome that the 
“confidence of writers who deal in semi-scientific para- 
doxes is commonly in inverse proportion to their grasp of 
the subject.” Again my vanity suggested to me that I 
was the person for whose benefit this gnome was intended. 
My vanity, indeed, was well fed by the whole transaction ; 
for I saw that not only did Mr. Darwin, who should be the 
best judge, think my work worth notice, but that he did 
not venture to meet it openly. As for Dr. Krause’s con- 
cluding sentence, I thought that when a sentence had 
been antedated, the less it contained about anachronism 
the better. 

Only one of the reviews that I saw of Mr. Darwin's 


46 Unconscious Memory 


“ Life of Erasmus Darwin” showed any knowledge of 
the facts. The Popular Science Review for January 1880, 
in flat contradiction to Mr. Darwin’s preface, said that 
only part of Dr. Krause’s article was being given by Mr. 
Darwin. This reviewer had plainly seen both Kosmos and 
Mr. Darwin’s book. 

In the same number of the Popular Science Review, and 
immediately following the review of Mr. Darwin’s book, 
there is a review of ‘“ Evolution, Old and New.” The 
writer of this review quotes the passage about mental 
anachronism as quoted by the reviewer in the Pall Mall 
Gazette, and adds immediately: ‘‘ This anachronism has 
been committed by Mr. Samuel Butler in a... . little 
volume now before us, and it is doubtless to this, which 
appeared wiile his own work was in progress {italics mine], 
that Dr. Krause alludes in the foregoing passage.” Con- 
sidering that the editor of the Popular Science Review and 
the translator of Dr. Krause’s article for Mr. Darwin are 
one and the same person, it is likely the Popular Science 
Review is well informed in saying that my book appeared 
before Dr. Krause’s article had been transformed into its 
present shape, and that my book was intended by the 
passage in question. 

Unable to see any way of escaping from a conclusion 
which I could not willingly adopt, I thought it best to 
write to Mr. Darwin, stating the facts as they appeared 
to myself, and asking an explanation, which I would have 
gladly strained a good many points to have accepted. 
It is better, perhaps, that I should give my letter and Mr. 
Darwin's answer in full. My letter ran thus :— 


January 2, 1880. 
CHARLES Darwin, EsgQ., F.R.S., &c. 

DEAR S1r,—Will you kindly refer me to the edition of 
Kosmos which contains the text of Dr. Krause’s article on 
Dr. Erasmus Darwin, as translated by Mr. W. S. Dallas ? 

I have before me the last February number of Kosmos, 
which appears by your preface to be the one from which Mr. 
Dallas has translated, but his translation contains long and 


Mr. Darwin and “ Evolution,” etc. 47 


important passages which are not in the February number of 
Kosmos, while many passages in the original article are omitted 
in the translation. 

Among the passages introduced are the last six pages of 
the English article, which seem to condemn by anticipation 
the position I have taken as regards Dr. Erasmus Darwin in 
my book, ‘“‘ Evolution, Old and New,” and which I believe I 
was the first to take. The concluding, and therefore, perhaps, 
most prominent sentence of the translation you have given 
to the public stands thus :-— 

‘Erasmus Darwin’s system was in itself a most significant 
first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has 
opened up for us, but to wish to revive it at the present 
day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weak- 
ness of thought and a mental anachronism which no man 
can envy.” 

The Kosmos which has been sent me from Germany con- 
tains no such passage. 

As you have stated in your preface that my book 
‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,’’ appeared subsequently to Dr. 
Krause’s article, and as no intimation is given that the article 
has been altered and added to since its original appearance, 
while the accuracy of the translation as though from the 
February number of Kosmos is, as you expressly say, guaran- 
teed by Mr. Dallas’s “‘ scientific reputation together with his 
knowledge of German,” your readers will naturally suppose 
that all they read in the translation appeared in February 
last, and therefore before ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” was 
written, and therefore independently of, and necessarily 
without reference to, that book. 

I do not doubt that this was actually the case, but have 
failed to obtain the edition which contains the passage above 
referred to, and several others which appear in the translation. 

I have a personal interest in this matter, and venture, 
therefore, to ask for the explanation, which I do not doubt 
you will readily give me.—Yours faithfully, 5. BUTLER. 


The following is Mr. Darwin’s answer :— 


January 3, 1880. 


My Dear Sir,—Dr. Krause, soon after the appearance 
of his article in Kosmos, told me that he intended to publish 
it separately and to alter it considerably, and the altered MS. 
was sent to Mr. Dallas for translation. This is so common 
a practice that it never occurred to me to state that the article 
had been modified ; but now I much regret that I did not doso. 


48 Unconscious Memory 


The original will soon appear in German, and I believe will be a 
much larger book than the English one ; for, with Dr. Krause’s 
consent, many long extracts from Miss Seward were omitted 
(as well as much other matter), from being in my opinion 
superfluous for the English reader. I believe that the omitted 
parts will appear as notes in the German edition. Should 
there be a reprint of the English Life, I will state that the 
original as it appeared in Kosmos was modified by Dr. Krause 
before it was translated. I may add that I had obtained Dr. 
Krause’s consent for a translation, and had arranged with 
Mr. Dallas before your book was announced. I remember this 
because Mr. Dallas wrote to tell me of the advertisement.—I 
remain, yours faithfully, C. DARWIN. 


This was not a letter I could accept. If Mr. Darwin 
had said that by some inadvertence, which he was unable 
to excuse or account for, a blunder had been made which 
he would at once correct so far as was in his power by a 
letter to The Times or the Atheneum, and that a notice of 
the erratum should be printed on a flyleaf and pasted into 
all unsold copies of the ‘‘ Life of Erasmus Darwin,” there 
would have been no more heard about the matter from 
me; but when Mr. Darwin maintained that it was a 
common practice to take advantage of an opportunity of 
revising a work to interpolate a covert attack upon an 
opponent, and at the same time to misdate the interpolated 
matter by expressly stating that it appeared months 
sooner than it actually did, and prior to the work which 
it attacked; when he maintained that what was being 
done was “so common a practice that it never occurred ” 
to him—the writer of some twenty volumes—to do what 
all literary men must know to be inexorably requisite, I 
thought this was going far beyond what was permissible 
in honourable warfare, and that it was time, in the interests 
of literary and scientific morality, even more than in my 
own, to appeal to public opinion. I was particularly 
struck with the use of the words “‘ it never occurred to me,” 
and felt how completely of a piece it was with the opening 
paragraph of the “‘ Origin of Species.”’ It was not merely 


Mr. Darwin and ‘‘ Evolution,” etc. 49 


that it did not occur to Mr. Darwin to state that the 
article had been modified since 1t was written—this would 
have been bad enough under the circumstances—but 
that it did occur to him to go out of his way to say what 
was not true. There was no necessity for him to have 
said anything about my book. It appeared, moreover, 
inadequate to tell me that if a reprint of the English Life 
was wanted (which might or might not be the case, and 
if it was not the case, why, a shrug of the shoulders, and 
I must make the best of it), Mr. Darwin might perhaps 
silently omit his note about my book, as he omitted his 
misrepresentation of the author of the “ Vestiges o 
Creation,’ and put the words “ revised and corrected by 
the author ”’ on his title-page. 

No matter how high a writer may stand, nor what 
services he may have unquestionably rendered, it cannot 
be for the general well-being that he should be allowed to 
set aside the fundamental principles of straightforwardness 
and fair play. When I thought of Buffon, of Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin, of Lamarck, and even of the author of the “‘ Ves- 
tiges of Creation,’ to all of whom Mr. Darwin had dealt 
the same measure which he was now dealing to myself ; 
when I thought of these great men, now dumb, who had 
borne the burden and heat of the day, and whose laurels 
had been filched from them; of the manner, too, in 
which Mr. Darwin had been abetted by those who should 
have been the first to detect the fallacy which had misled 
him; of the hotbed of intrigue which science has now 
become ; of the disrepute into which we English must fall 
as a nation if such practices as Mr. Darwin had attempted 
in this case were to be tolerated ;—when I thought of all 
this, I felt that though prayers for the repose of dead 
men’s souls might be unavailing, yet a defence of their 
work and memory, no matter against what odds, might 
avail the living, and resolved that I would do my utmost 
to make my countrymen aware of the spirit now ruling 
among those whom they delight to honour. 

E 


50 Unconscious Memory 


At first I thought I ought to continue the correspondence 
privately with Mr. Darwin, and explain to him that his 
letter was insufficient, but on reflection I felt that little 
good was likely to come of a second letter, if what I had 
already written was not enough. I therefore wrote to 
the Atheneum and gave a condensed account of the facts 
contained in the last ten or a dozen pages. My letter 
appeared January 31, 1880. 

The accusation was a very grave one; it was made in 
a very public place. I gave my name; I adduced the 
strongest prima facie grounds for the acceptance of my 
statements ; but there was no rejoinder, and for the best 
of all reasons—that no rejoinder was possible. Besides, 
what is the good of having a reputation for candour if one 
may not stand upon it at a pinch? I never yet knew a 
person with an especial reputation for candour without 
finding sooner or later that he had developed it as animals 
develop their organs, through “ sense of need.’’ Not only 
did Mr. Darwin remain perfectly quiet, but all reviewers 
and littévateurs remained perfectly quiet also. It seemed 
—though I do not for a moment believe that this is so— 
as if public opinion rather approved of what Mr. Darwin 
had done, and of his silence than otherwise. I saw the 
“Life of Erasmus Darwin” more frequently and more 
prominently advertised now than I had seen it hitherto— 
perhaps in the hope of selling off the adulterated copies, 
and being able to reprint the work with a corrected title- 
page. Presently I saw Professor Huxley hastening to the 
rescue with his lecture on the coming of age of the “ Origin 
of Species,’ and by May it was easy for Professor Ray 
Lankester to imply that Mr. Darwin was the greatest of 
living men. I have since noticed two or three other 
controversies raging in the Atheneum and Times ; in each 
of these cases I saw it assumed that the defeated party, 
when proved to have publicly misrepresented his adversary, 
should do his best to correct in public the injury which 
he had publicly inflicted, but I noticed that in none of 


Mr. Darwin and ‘‘Evolution,” etc. 51 


them had the beaten side any especial reputation for can 
dour. This probably made all the difference. But however 
this may be, Mr. Darwin left me in possession of the field, 
in the hope, doubtless, that the matter would blow over— 
which it apparently soon did. Whether it has done so in 
- reality or no, is a matter which remains to be seen. My 
own belief is that people paid no attention to what I said, 
as believing it simply incredible, and that when they come 
to know that it is true, they will think as I do concern- 
ing it. 

From ladies and gentlemen of science I admit that I have 
no expectations. There is no conduct so dishonourable 
that people will not deny it or explain it away, if it has 
been committed by one whom they recognise as of their 
own persuasion. It must be remembered that facts cannot 
be respected by the scientist in the same way as by other 
people. It is his business to familiarise himself with facts, 
and, as we all know, the path from familiarity to contempt 
is an easy one. 

Here, then, I take leave of this matter for the present. 
If it appears that I have used language such as is rarely 
seen in controversy, let the reader remember that the 
occasion is, so far as I know, unparalleled for the cynicism 
and audacity with which the wrong complained of was 
committed and persisted in. I trust, however, that, 
though not indifferent to this, my indignation has been 
mainly roused, as when I wrote “‘ Evolution, Old and New,” 
before Mr. Darwin had given me personal ground of com- 
plaint against him, by the wrongs he has inflicted on dead 
men, on whose behalf I now fight, as I trust that some 
one—whom I thank by anticipation—may one day fight 
on mine. 


Chapter V 


Introduction to Professor Hering’s lecture. 


FTER I had finished ‘‘ Evolution, Old and New,” 
I wrote some articles for the Examiner,! in which I 
carried out the idea put forward in “ Life and Habit,” 
that we are one person with our ancestors. It follows from 
this, that all living animals and vegetables, being—as 
appears likely if the theory of evolution is accepted—de- 
scended from a common ancestor, are in reality one person, 
and unite to form a body corporate, of whose existence, 
however, they are unconscious. There is an obvious analogy 
between this and the manner in which the component 
cells of our bodies unite to form our single individuality, 
of which it is not likely they have a conception, and with 
which they have probably only the same partial and 
imperfect sympathy as we, the body corporate, have with 
them. In the articles above alluded to I separated the 
organic from the inorganic, and when I came to rewrite 
them, I found that this could not be done, and that I must 
reconstruct what I had written. I was at work on this—to 
which I hope to return shortly—when Dr Krause’s “ Eras- 
mus Darwin,’ with its preliminary notice by Mr. Charles 
Darwin, came out, and having been compelled, as I have 
shown above, by Dr. Krause’s work to look a little into the 
German language, the opportunity seemed favourable for 
going on with it and becoming acquainted with Professor 
Hering’s lecture. I therefore began to translate his lecture 
at once, with the kind assistance of friends whose patience 
1 Since published as ‘‘ God the Known and God the Unknown.”’ 
Fifield, 1909. 
52 


Introduction to Hering’s Lecture 53 


seemed inexhaustible, and found myself well rewarded for 
my trouble. 

Professor Hering and I, to use a metaphor of his own, 
are as men who have observed the action of living beings 
upon the stage of the world, he from the point of view at 
once of a spectator and of one who has free access to much 
of what goes on behind the scenes, I from that of a spectator 
only, with none but the vaguest notion of the actual 
manner in which the stage machinery is worked. If two 
men so placed, after years of reflection, arrive indepen- 
dently of one another at an identical conclusion as regards 
the manner in which this machinery must have been 
invented and perfected, it is natural that each should 
take a deep interest in the arguments of the other, and 
be anxious to put them forward with the utmost possible 
prominence. It seems to me that the theory which Pro- 
fessor Hering and I are supporting in common, is one 
the importance of which is hardly inferior to that of the 
theory of evolution itself—for it puts the backbone, as it 
were, into the theory of evolution. I shall therefore make 
no apology for laying my translation of Professor Hering’s 
work before my reader. 

Concerning the identity of the main idea put forward 
in “Life and Habit”? with that of Professor Hering’s 
lecture, there can hardly, I think, be two opinions. We 
both of us maintain that we grow our limbs as we do, 
and possess the instincts we possess, because we remember 
having grown our limbs in this way, and having had these 
instincts in past generations when we were in the persons 
of our forefathers—each individual life adding a small 
(but so small, in any one lifetime, as to be hardly appreci- 
able) amount of new experience to the general store of 
memory ; that we have thus got into certain habits which 
we can now rarely break ; and that we do much of what 
we do unconsciously on the same principle as that (what- 
ever it is) on which we do all other habitual actions, with 
the greater ease and unconsciousness the more often we 


54 Unconscious Memory 


repeat them. Not only is the main idea the same, but I 
was surprised to find how often Professor Hering and I had 
taken the same illustrations with which to point our 
meaning. 

Nevertheless, we have each of us left undealt with some 
points which the other has treated of. Professor Hering, 
for example, goes into the question of what memory is, 
and this I did not venture to do. I confined myself to 
saying that whatever memory was, heredity was also. 
Professor Hering adds that memory is due to vibrations 
of the molecules of the nerve fibres, which under certain 
circumstances recur, and bring about a corresponding 
recurrence of visible action. 

This approaches closely to the theory concerning the 
physics of memory which has been most generally adopted 
since the time of Bonnet, who wrote as follows :— 


The soul never has a new sensation but by the inter- 
position of the senses. This sensation has been originally 
attached to the motion of certain fibres. Its reproduction or 
recollection by the senses will then be likewise connected 
with these same fibres.1 . . . 


And again :— 


It appeared to me that since this Memory is connected 
with the body, it must depend upon some change which 
must happen to the primitive state of the sensible fibres by the 
action of objects. I have, therefore, admitted as probable 
| that the state of the fibres on which an object has acted is 
not precisely the same after this action as it was before. I 
have conjectured that the sensible fibres experienced more or 
less durable modifications, which constitute the physics of 
memory and recollection. . . .? 


Professor Hering comes near to endorsing this view, 
and uses it for the purpose of explaining personal identity. 
This, at least, is what he does in fact, though perhaps 
hardly in words. I did not say more upon the essence of 


*“ Contemplation of Nature,”’ Engl. trans., Lond. 1 776. Preface, 
Pp. XXXvi. 
 Ibid., p. xxxviii. 


Introduction to Hering’s Lecture 55 


personality than that it was inseparable from the idea 
that the various phases of our existence should have flowed 
one out of the other, “‘in what we see as a continuous, 
though it may be at times a very troubled, stream ”’ ; } 
but I maintained that the identity between two successive 
generations was of essentially the same kind as that 
existing between an infant and an octogenarian. I thus 
left personal identity unexplained, though insisting that 
it was the key to two apparently distinct sets of pheno- 
mena, the one of which had been hitherto considered in- 
compatible with our ideas concerning it. Professor Hering 
insists on this too, but he gives us farther insight into 
what personal identity is, and explains how it is that the 
phenomena of heredity are phenomena also of personal 
identity. 

He implies, though in the short space at his command 
he has hardly said so in express terms, that personal 
identity as we commonly think of it—that is to say, as 
confined to the single life of the individual—consists in 
the uninterruptedness of a sufficient number of vibrations, 
which have been communicated from molecule to molecule 
of the nerve fibres, and which go on communicating each 
one of them its own peculiar characteristic elements to the 
new matter which we introduce into the body by way of 
nutrition. These vibrations may be so gentle as to be 
imperceptible for years together ; but they are there, and 
may become perceived if they receive accession through 
the running into them of a wave going the same way as 
themselves, which wave has been set up in the ether by 
exterior objects and has been communicated to the organs 
of sense. 

As these pages are on the point of leaving my hands, I 
see the following remarkable passage in Mind for the 
current month, and introduce it parenthetically here :— 


I followed the sluggish current of hyaline material 
issuing from globules of most primitive living substance. 


1 “ Tife and Habit,” p. 97. 


56 Unconscious Memory 


Persistently it followed its way into space, conquering, at 
first, the manifold resistences opposed to it by its watery 
medium. Gradually, however, its energies became ex- 
hausted, till at last, completely overwhelmed, it stopped, 
an immovable projection stagnated to death-like rigidity. 
Thus for hours, perhaps, it remained stationary, one of 
many such rays of some of the many kinds of protoplasmic 
stars. By degrees, then, or perhaps quite suddenly, help 
would come to it from foreign but congruous sources. It would 
seem to combine with outside complemental matter drifted to it at 
random. Slowly it would regain thereby its vital mobility. 
Shrinking at first, but gradually completely restored and 
reincorporated into the outward tide of life, it was ready to 
take part again in the progressive flow of a new ray.! 


To return to the end of the last paragraph but one. 
If this is so—but I should warn the reader that Professor 
Hering is not responsible for this suggestion, though it 
seems to follow so naturally from what he has said that 
I imagine he intended the inference to be drawn,—if this 
Is so, assimilation is nothing else than the communication 
of its own rhythms from the assimilating to the assimilated 
substance, to the effacement of the vibrations or rhythms 
heretofore existing in this last ; and suitability for food 
will depend upon whether the rhythms of the substance 
eaten are such as to flow harmoniously into and chime in 
with those of the body which has eaten it, or whether they 
will refuse to act in concert with the new rhythms with 
which they have become associated, and will persist 
obstinately in pursuing their own course. In this case 
they will either be turned out of the body at once, or will 
disconcert its arrangements, with perhaps fatal conse- 
quences. This comes round to the conclusion I arrived 
at in “Life and Habit,” that assimilation was nothing 
but the imbuing of one thing with the memories of another. 
(See “ Life and Habit,” pp. 136, TAT LAOH ORD 

It will be noted that, as I resolved the phenomena of 
heredity into phenomena of personal identity, and left the 


an eThe Unity of the Organic Individual,” by Edward Mont- 
gomery, Mind, October 1880, p. 466, 


Introduction to Hering’s Lecture 57 


matter there, so Professor Hering resolves the phenomena 
of personal identity into the phenomena of a living 
mechanism whose equilibrium is disturbed by vibrations 
of a certain character—and leaves it there. We now want 
to understand more about the vibrations. 

But if, according to Professor Hering, the personal 
identity of the single life consists in the uninterruptedness 
of vibrations, so also do the phenomena of heredity. For 
not only may vibrations of a certain violence or character 
be persistent unperceived for many years in a living body, 
and communicate themselves to the matter it has assimi- 
lated, but they may, and will, under certain circumstances, 
extend to the particle which is about to leave the parent 
body as the germ of its future offspring. In this minute 
piece of matter there must, if Professor Hering is right, 
be an infinity of rhythmic undulations incessantly vibrating 
with more or less activity, and ready to be set in more 
active agitation at a moment’s warning, under due ac- 
cession of vibration from exterior objects. On the occur- 
rence of such stimulus, that is to say, when a vibration 
of a suitable rhythm from without concurs with one within 
the body so as to augment it, the agitation may gather 
such strength that the touch, as it were, is given to a 
house of cards, and the whole comes toppling over. This 
toppling over is what we call action ; and when it is the 
result of the disturbance of certain usual arrangements 
in certain usual ways, we call it the habitual development 
and instinctive characteristics of the race. In either case, 
then, whether we consider the continued identity of the 
individual in what we call his single life, or those features 
in his offspring which we refer to heredity, the same 
explanation of the phenomena is applicable. It follows 
from this as a matter of course, that the continuation of 
life or personal identity in the individual and the race are 
fundamentally of the same kind, or, in other words, that 
there is a veritable prolongation of identity or oneness 
of personality between parents and offspring. Professor 


58 Unconscious Memory 


Hering reaches his conclusion by physical methods, while 
I reached mine, as I am told, by metaphysical. I never yet 
could understand what ‘‘ metaphysics’ and “ meta- 
physical’? mean; but I should have said I reached it by 
the exercise of a little common sense while regarding 
certain facts which are open to every one. There is, 
however, so far as I can see, no difference in the conclusion 
come to. . 

The view which connects memory with vibrations may 
tend to throw light upon that difficult question, the 
manner in which neuter bees acquire structures and 
instincts, not one of which was possessed by any of their 
direct ancestors. Those who have read “‘ Life and Habit ” 
may remember, I suggested that the food prepared in the 
stomachs of the nurse-bees, with which the neuter working 
bees are fed, might thus acquire a quasi-seminal character, 
and be made a means of communicating the instincts and 
structures in question. If assimilation be regarded as 
the receiving by one substance of the rhythms or undula- 
tions from another, the explanation just referred to receives 
an accession of probability. 

If it is objected that Professor Hering’s theory as to 
continuity of vibrations being the key to memory and 
heredity involves the action of more wheels within wheels 
than our imagination can come near to comprehending, 
and also that it supposes this complexity of action as going 
on within a compass which no unaided eye can detect by 
reason of its littleness, so that we are carried into a fairy- 
land with which sober people should have nothing to do, 
it may be answered that the case of light affords us an 
example of our being truly aware of a multitude of minute 
actions, the hundred million millionth part of which we 
should have declared to be beyond our ken, could we not 
incontestably prove that we notice and count them all 
with a very sufficient and creditable accuracy. 


1 “ Life and Habit,” p. 237. 


Introduction to Hering’s Lecture 59 


“ Who would not,’! says Sir John Herschel, “ ask for 
demonstration when told that a gnat’s wing, in its ordinary 
flight, beats many hundred times in a second? or that 
there exist animated and regularly organised beings many 
thousands of whose bodies laid close together would not 
extend to an inch ? But what are these to the astonishing 
truths which modern optical inquiries have disclosed, 
which teach us that every point of a medium through 
which a ray of light passes is affected with a succession 
of periodical movements, recurring regularly at equal 
intervals, no less than five hundred millions of millions of 
times in a second; that it is by such movements com- 
municated to the nerves of our eyes that we see; nay, 
more, that it is the difference in the frequency of their 
recurrence which affects us with the sense of the diversity 
of colour ; that, for instance, in acquiring the sensation of 
redness, our eyes are affected four hundred and eighty-two 
millions of millions of times ; of yellowness, five hundred 
and forty-two millions of millions of times ; and of violet, 
seven hundred and seven millions of millions of times 
per second? ? Do not such things sound more like the 
ravings of madmen than the sober conclusions of people 
in their waking senses? They are, nevertheless, con- 
clusions to which any one may most certainly arrive who 
will only be at the pains of examining the chain of reasoning 
by which they have been obtained.”’ 

A man counting as hard as he can repeat numbers one 
after another, and never counting more than a hundred, 
so that he shall have no long words to repeat, may perhaps 
count ten thousand, or a hundred a hundred times over, 
in an hour. At this rate, counting night and day, and 
allowing no time for rest or refreshment, he would count 
one million in four days and four hours, or say four days 


1 Discourse on the ‘‘ Study of Natural Philosophy.” Lardner’s 
‘Moa. Cyclo: i -volexcix./p. 24: 

2 Young’s ‘‘ Lectures on Natural Philosophy,” ii. 627. See also 
‘Phil. Trans.,’’? 1801-2 


60 Unconscious Memory 


only. To count a million a million times over, he would 
require four million days, or roughly ten thousand years ; 
for five hundred millions of millions, he must have the 
utterly unrealisable period of five million years. Yet he 
actually goes through this stupendous piece of reckoning 
unconsciously hour after hour, day after day, it may be 
for eighty years, often in each second of daylight; and 
how much more by artificial or subdued light 1 do not 
know. He knows whether his eye is being struck five 
hundred millions of millions of times, or only four hundred 
and eighty-two millions of millions of times. He thus 
shows that he estimates or counts each set of vibrations, 
and registers them according to his results. If a man 
writes upon the back of a British Museum blotting-pad 
of the common nonpareil pattern, on which there are some 
thousands of small spaces each differing in colour from 
that which is immediately next to it, his eye will, never- 
theless, without an effort assign its true colour to each 
one of these spaces. This implies that he is all the time 
counting and taking tally of the difference in the numbers 
of the vibrations from each one of the small spaces in 
question. Yet the mind that is capable of such stupendous 
computations as these so long as it knows nothing about 
them, makes no little fuss about the conscious adding 
together of such almost inconceivably minute numbers as, 
we will say, 2730169 and 5790135—or, if these be con- 
sidered too large, as 27 and 1g. Let the reader remember 
that he cannot by any effort bring before his mind the 
units, not in ones, but in millions of millions of the pro- 
cesses which his visual organs are undergoing second 
after second from dawn till dark, and then let him 
demur if he will to the possibility of the existence in a 
germ, of currents and undercurrents, and rhythms and 
counter-rhythms, also by the million of millions—each 
one of which, on being overtaken by the rhythm from 
without that chimes in with and stimulates it, may 
be the beginning of that unsettlement of equilibrium 


Introduction to Hering’s Lecture 61 


which results in the crash of action, unless it is timely 
counteracted. 

If another objector maintains that the vibrations within 
the germ as above supposed must be continually crossing 
and interfering with one another in such a manner as to 
destroy the continuity of any one series, it may be replied 
that the vibrations of the light proceeding from the objects 
that surround us traverse one another by the millions of 
millions every second yet in no way interfere with one 
another. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the 
difficulties of the theory towards which I suppose Professor 
Hering to incline are like those of all other theories on the 
same subject—almost inconceivably great. 

In “Life and Habit” I did not touch upon these 
vibrations, knowing nothing about them. Here, then, 
is one important point of difference, not between the con- 
clusions arrived at, but between the aim and scope of the 
work that Professor Hering and I severally attempted. 
Another difference consists in the points at which we have 
left off. Professor Hering, having established his main 
thesis, is content. I, on the other hand, went on to maintain 
that if vigour was due to memory, want of vigour was due 
to want of memory. Thus I was led to connect memory 
with the phenomena of hybridism and of old age ; to show 
that the sterility of certain animals under domestication 
is only a phase of, and of a piece with, the very common 
sterility of hybrids—phenomena, which at first sight have 
no connection either with each other or with memory, 
but the connection between which will never be lost sight 
of by those who have once laid hold of it. [I also pointed 
out how exactly the phenomena of development agreed 
with those of the abeyance and recurrence of memory, and 
the rationale of the fact that puberty in so many animals 
and plants comes about the end of development. The 
principle underlying longevity follows as a matter of 
course. I have no idea how far Professor Hering would 
agree with me in the position I have taken in respect of 


62 Unconscious Memory 


these phenomena, but there is nothing in the above at 
variance with his lecture. 

Another matter on which Professor Hetine has not 
touched is the bearing of his theory on that view of evolu- 
tion which is now commonly accepted. It is plain he 
accepts evolution, but it does not appear that he sees how 
fatal his theory is to any view of evolution except a teleo- 
logical one—the purpose residing within the animal and 
not without it. There is, however, nothing in his lecture 
to indicate that he does not see this. 

It should be remembered that the question whether 
memory is due to the persistence within the body of certain 
vibrations, which have been already set up within the 
bodies of its ancestors, is true or no, will not affect the 
position I took up in “ Life and Habit.’”’ In that book I 
have maintained nothing more than that whatever memory 
is heredity is also. I am not committed to the vibration 
theory of memory, though inclined to accept it on a 
prima facie view. All lam committed to is, that if memory 
is due to persistence of vibrations, so is heredity ; and if 
memory is not so due, then no more is heredity. | 

Finally, I may say that Professor Hering’s lecture, the 
passage quoted from Dr. Erasmus Darwin on p. 26 of 
this volume, and a few hints in the extracts from Mr. 
Patrick Mathew which I have quoted in “ Evolution, 
Old and New,” are all that I yet know of in other writers 
as pointing to the conclusion that the phenomena of 
heredity are phenomena also of memory. 


Chapter VI 


Professor Ewald Hering “ On Memory.” 


WILL now lay before the reader a translation of Pro- 

fessor Hering’s own words. I have had it carefully 
revised throughout by a gentleman whose native language is 
German, but who has resided in England for many years 
past. The original lecture is entitled ““On Memory as a 
Universal Function of Organised Matter,’ and was de- 
livered at the anniversary meeting of the Imperial Academy 
of Sciences at Vienna, May 30, 1870.1 It is as follows :— 


When the student of Nature quits the narrow workshop 
of his own particular inquiry, and sets out upon an excursion 
into the vast kingdom of philosophical investigation, he 
does so, doubtless, in the hope of finding the answer to that 
great riddle, to the solution of a small part of which he 
devotes his life. Those, however, whom he leaves behind 
him still working at their own special branch of inquiry, 
regard his departure with secret misgivings on his behalf 
while the born citizens of the kingdom of speculation 
among whom he would naturalise himself, receive him 
with well-authorised distrust. He is likely, therefore, to 
lose ground with the first, while not gaining it with the 
second. 

The subject to the consideration of which I would now 
solicit your attention does certainly appear likely to lure 
us on towards the flattering land of speculation, but bearing 
in mind what I have just said, I will beware of quitting 
the department of natural science to which I have devoted 
myself hitherto. I shall, however, endeavour to attain 


1 The lecture is published by Karl Gerold’s Sohn, Vienna. 
63 


64 Unconscious Memory 


its highest point, so as to take a freer view of the surround- 
ing territory. 

It will soon appear that I should fail in this purpose if 
my remarks were to confine themselves solely to physiology. 
I hope to show how far psychological investigations also 
afford not only permissible, but indispensable, aid to 
physiological inquiries. 

Consciousness is an accompaniment of that animal and 
human organisation and of that material mechanism 
which it is the province of physiology to explore ; and as 
long as the atoms of the brain follow their due course 
according to certain definite laws, there arises an inner 
life which springs from sensation and idea, from feeling 
and will. 

We feel this in our own cases; it strikes us in our con- 
verse with other people ; we can see it plainly in the more 
highly organised animals; even the lowest forms of life 
bear traces of it ; and who can draw a line in the kingdom 
of organic life, and say that it is here the soul ceases ¢ 

With what eyes, then, is physiology to regard this two- 
fold life of the organised world? Shall she close them 
entirely to one whole side of it, that she may fix them 
more intently on the other ° 

So long as the physiologist is content to be a physicist, 
and nothing more—using the word “ physicist ’’ in its 
widest signification—his position in regard to the organic 
world is one of extreme but legitimate one-sidedness. As 
the crystal to the mineralogist or the vibrating string to the 
acoustician, so from this point of view both man and the 
lower animals are to the physiologist neither more nor 
less than the matter of which they consist. That animals 
feel desire and repugnance, that the material mechanism 
of the human frame is in close connection with emotions 
of pleasure or pain, and with the active idea-life of con- 
sciousness—this cannot, in the eyes of the physicist, make 
the animal or human body into anything more than what 
it actually is. To him it is a combination of matter, 


Translation from Hering 65 


subjected to the same inflexible laws as stones and plants 
—a material combination, the outward and inward move- 
ments of which interact as cause and effect, and are in as 
close connection with each other and with their surround- 
ings as the working of a machine with the revolutions 
of the wheels that compose it. 

Neither sensation, nor idea, nor yet conscious will, can 
form a link in this chain of material occurrences which 
make up the physical life of an organism. If I am asked 
a question and reply to it, the material process which the 
nerve fibre conveys from the organ of hearing to the 
brain must travel through my brain as an actual and 
material process before it can reach the nerves which will 
act upon my organs of speech. It cannot, on reaching 
a given place in the brain, change then and there into an 
immaterial something, and turn up again some time 
afterwards in another part of the brain as a material process. 
The traveller in the desert might as well hope, before he 
again goes forth into the wilderness of reality, to take 
rest and refreshment in the oasis with which the Fata 
Morgana illudes him ; or as well might a prisoner hope to 
escape from his prison through a door reflected in a mirror. 

So much for the physiologist in his capacity of pure 
physicist. As long as he remains behind the scenes in 
painful exploration of the details of the machinery—as 
long as he only observes the action of the players from 
behind the stage—so long will he miss the spirit of the 
performance, which is, nevertheless, caught easily by one 
who sees it from the front. May he not, then, for once 
in a way, be allowed to change his standpoint? True, 
he came not to see the representation of an imaginary 
world ; he is in search of the actual; but surely it must 
help him to a comprehension of the dramatic apparatus 
itself, and of the manner in which it is worked, if he were 
to view its action from the front as well as from behind, 
or at least allow himself to hear what sober-minded spec- 
tators can tell him upon the subject. 


F 


66 Unconscious Memory 


There can be no question as to the answer ; and hence 
it comes that psychology is such an indispensable help to 
physiology, whose fault it only in small part is that she 
has hitherto made such little use of this assistance; for 
psychology has been late in beginning to till her fertile 
field with the plough of the inductive method, and it is 
only from ground so tilled that fruits can spring which can 
be of service to physiology. 

If, then, the student of nervous physiology takes his 
stand between the physicist and the psychologist, and if 
the first of these rightly makes the unbroken causative 
continuity of all material processes an axiom of his system 
of investigation, the prudeht psychologist, on the other 
hand, will investigate the !as of conscious life according 
to the inductive method, @nd will hence, as much as the 
physicist, make the existence of fixed laws his initial 
assumption. If, again, the most superficial introspection 
teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent 
upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that 
inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations 
to his will, then it only remains for him to make one 
assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence 
between the spiritual and the material 1s itself also dependent 
on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the 
science of the matter and the science of consciousness are 
united into a single whole. 

Thus regarded, the phenomena of consciousness become 
functions of the material changes of organised substance, 
and inversely—though this is involved in the use of the 
word ‘“‘ function ’’—the material processes of brain sub- 
stance become functions of the phenomena of consciousness. 
For when two variables are so dependent upon one another 
in the changes they undergo in accordance with fixed laws 
that a change in either involves simultaneous and corre- 
sponding change in the other, the one is called a function 
of the other. 

This, then, by no means implies that the two variables 


Translation from Hering 67 


above-named—matter and consciousness—stand in the 
relation of cause and effect, antecedent and consequence, 
to one another. For on this subject we know nothing. 
The materialist regards consciousness as a product or 
result of matter, while the idealist holds matter to be a 
result of consciousness, and a third maintains that matter 
and spirit are identical; with all this the physiologist, 
as such, has nothing whatever to do; his sole concern 
is with the fact that matter and consciousness are functions 
one of the other. 

By the help of this hypothesis of the functional inter- 
dependence of matter and spirit, modern physiology is 
enabled to bring the phenomena of consciousness within 
the domain of her investigations without leaving the 
terra firma of scientific methods. The physiologist, as 
physicist, can follow the ray of light and the wave of sound 
or heat till they reach the organ of sense. He can watch 
them entering upon the ends of the nerves, and finding 
their way to the cells of the brain by means of the series 
of undulations or vibrations which they establish in the 
nerve filaments. Here, however, he loses all trace of them. 
On the other hand, still looking with the eyes of a pure 
physicist, he sees sound waves of speech issue from the 
mouth of a speaker ; he observes the motion of his own 
limbs, and finds how this is conditional upon muscular 
contractions occasioned by the motor nerves, and how 
these nerves are in their turn excited by the cells of the 
central organ. But here again his knowledge comes to an 
end. True, he sees indications of the bridge which is to 
carry him from excitation of the sensory to that of the 
motor nerves in the labyrinth of intricately interwoven 
nerve cells, but he knows nothing of the inconceivably 
complex process which is introduced at this stage. Here 
the physiologist will change his standpoint ; what matter 
will not reveal to his inquiry, he will find in the mirror, 
as it were, of consciousness ; by way of a reflection, indeed, 
only, but a reflection, nevertheless, which stands in intimate 


68 Unconscious Memory 


relation to the object of his inquiry. When at this point 
he observes how one idea gives rise to another, how closely 
idea is connected with sensation and sensation with will, 
and how thought, again, and feeling are inseparable from 
one another, he will be compelled to suppose corresponding 
successions of material processes, which generate and are 
closely connected *with one another, and which attend 
the whole machinery of conscious life, according to the 
law of the functional interdependence of matter and 
consciousness. 


After this explanation I shall venture to regard under 
a single aspect a great series of phenomena which apparently 
have nothing to do with one another, and which belong 
partly to the conscious and partly to the unconscious 
life of organised beings. I shall regard them as the outcome 
of one and the same primary force of organised matter— 
namely, its memory or power of reproduction. 

The word ‘“‘ memory ” is often understood as though it 
meant nothing more than our faculty of intentionally 
reproducing ideas or series of ideas. But when the figures 
and events of bygone days rise up again unbidden in our 
minds, is not this also an act of recollection or memory ? 
We have a perfect right to extend our conception of 
memory so as to make it embrace involuntary reproductions 
of sensations, ideas, perceptions, and efforts ; but we find 
on having done so, that we have so far enlarged her bound- 
aries that she proves to be an ultimate and original power, 
the source, and at the same time the unifying bond, of our 
whole conscious life. 

We know that when an impression, or a series of im- 
pressions, has been made upon our senses for a long time, 
and always in the same way, it may come to impress itself 
in such a manner upon the so-called sense-memory that 
hours afterwards, and though a hundred other things 
have occupied our attention meanwhile, it will yet return 


Translation from Hering 69 


suddenly to our consciousness with all the force and 
freshness of the original sensation. A whole group of 
sensations is sometimes reproduced in its due sequence 
as regards time and space, with so much reality that it 
illudes us, as though things were actually present which 
have long ceased to be so. We have here a striking proof 
of the fact that after both conscious sensation and percep- 
tion have been extinguished, their material vestiges yet 
remain in our nervous system by way of a change in its 
molecular or atomic disposition, that enables the nerve 
substance to reproduce all physical processes of the 
original sensation, and with these the corresponding 
psychical processes of sensation and perception. 

Every hour the phenomena of sense-memory are present 
with each one of us, but in a less degree than this. We 
are all at times aware of a host of more or less faded 
recollections of earlier impressions, which we either summon 
intentionally or which come upon us involuntarily. Visions 
of absent people come and go before us as faint and fleeting 
shadows, and the notes of long-forgotten melodies float 
around us, not actually heard, but yet perceptible. 

Some things and occurrences, especially if they have 
happened to us only once and hurriedly, will be repro- 
ducible by the memory in respect only of a few conspicuous 
qualities ; in other cases those details alone will recur to 
us which we have met with elsewhere, and for the reception 
of which the brain is, so to speak, attuned. These last 
recollections find themselves in fuller accord with our 
consciousness, and enter upon it more easily and energeti- 
cally ; hence also their aptitude for reproduction is en- 
hanced ; so that what is common to many things, and is 
therefore felt and perceived with exceptional frequency, 
becomes reproduced so easily that eventually the actual 
presence of the corresponding external stimuli is no longer 
necessary, and it will recur on the vibrations set up by 


1 See quotation from Bonnet, p. 54 of this volume. 


70 Unconscious Memory 


faint stimuli from within.t Sensations arising in this way 
from within, as, for example, an idea of whiteness, are 
not, indeed, perceived with the full freshness of those 
raised by the actual presence of white light without us, 
but they are of the same kind ; they are feeble repetitions 
of one and the same material brain process—of one and 
the same conscious sensation. Thus the idea of whiteness 
arises in our mind as a faint, almost extinct, sensation. 

In this way those qualities which are common to many 
things become separated, as it were, in our memory from 
the objects with which they were originally associated, 
and attain an independent existence in our consciousness 
as ideas and conceptions, and thus the whole rich super- 
structure of our ideas and conceptions is built up from 
materials supplied by memory. 

On examining more closely, we see plainly that memory 
is a faculty not only of our conscious states, but also, and 
much more so, of our unconscious ones. I was conscious 
of this or that yesterday, and am again conscious of it 
to-day. Where has it been meanwhile? It does not 
remain continuously within my consciousness, neverthe- 
less it returns after having quitted it. Our ideas tread 
but for a moment upon the stage of consciousness, and 
then go back again behind the scenes, to make way for 
others in their place. As the player is only a king when 
he is on the stage, so they too exist as ideas so long only 
as they are recognised. How do they live when they are 


1 Professor Hering is not clear here. Vibrations (if I understand 
his theory rightly) should not be set up by faint stzmuli from within. 
Whence and what are these stimul1? The vibrations within are 
already existing, and it is they which are the stimuli to action. On 
having been once set up, they either continue in sufficient force 
to maintain action, or they die down, and become too weak to 
cause further action, and perhaps even to be perceived within the 
mind, until they receive an accession of vibration from without. 
The only ‘‘ stimulus from within ’”’ that should be able to generate 
action is that which may follow when a vibration already established 
in the body runs into another similar vibration already so established. 
On this consciousness, and even action, might be supposed to follow 
without the presence of an external stimulus. 


Translation from Hering 71 


off the stage ? For we know that they are living some- 
where ; give them their cue and they reappear immediately. 
They do not exist continuously as ideas; what is con- 
tinuous is the special disposition of nerve substance in 
virtue of which this substance gives out to-day the same 
sound which it gave yesterday if it is rightly struck." 
Countless reproductions of organic processes of our brain 
connect themselves orderly together, so that one acts as 
a stimulus to the next, but a phenomenon of consciousness 
is not necessarily attached to every link in the chain. 
From this it arises that a series of ideas may appear to 
disregard the order that would be observed in purely 
material processes of brain substance unaccompanied by 
consciousness ; but on the other hand it becomes possible 
for a long chain of recollections to have its due develop- 
ment without each link in the chain being necessarily 
perceived by ourselves. One may emerge from the bosom 
of our unconscious thoughts without fully entering upon 
the stage of conscious perception ; another dies away in 
unconsciousness, leaving no successor to take its place. 
Between the ‘“‘ me ”’ of to-day and the “‘ me”’ of yesterday 
lie night and sleep, abysses of unconsciousness ; nor is 
there any bridge but memory with which to span them. 
Who can hope after this to disentangle the infinite intricacy 
of our inner life? For we can only follow its threads so 
far as they have strayed over within the bounds of con- 
sciousness. We might as well hope to familiarise ourselves 
with the world of forms that teem within the bosom of the 
sea by observing the few that now and again come to the 
surface and soon return into the deep. 

The bond of union, therefore, which connects the indi- 
vidual phenomena of our consciousness lies in our un- 


1 This expression seems hardly applicable to the overtaking of 
an internal by an external vibration, but it is not inconsistent with 
it. Here, however, as frequently elsewhere, I doubt how far Pro- 
fessor Hering has fully realised his conception, beyond being, like 
myself, convinced that the phenomena of memory and of heredity 
have a common source. 


72 Unconscious Memory | 


conscious world ; and as we know nothing of this but what 
investigation into the laws of matter teach us—as, in fact, 
for purely experimental purposes, ‘‘ matter’? and the 
‘“ unconscious ’’ must be one and the same thing—so the 
physiologist has a full right to denote memory as, in the 
wider sense of the word, a function of brain substance, 
whose results, it is true, fall, as regards oné part of them, 
into the domain of consciousness, while another and not 
less essential part escapes unperceived as purely material 
processes. 

The perception of a body in space is a very complicated 
process. I see suddenly before me, for example, a white 
ball. This has the effect of conveying to me more than 
a mere sensation of whiteness. I deduce the spherical 
character of the ball from the gradations of light and 
shade upon its surface. I form a correct appreciation of its 
distance from my eye, and hence again I deduce an 
inference as to the size of the ball. What an expenditure 
of sensations, ideas, and inferences is found to be necessary 
before all this can be brought about; yet the production 
of a correct perception of the ball was the work only of a 
few seconds, and I was unconscious of the individual 
processes by means of which it was effected, the result as 
a whole being alone present in my consciousness. 

The nerve substance preserves faithfully the memory 
of habitual actions.1 Perceptions which were once long 
and difficult, requiring constant and conscious attention, 
come to reproduce themselves in transient and abridged 
guise, without such duration and intensity that each link 
has to pass over the threshold of our consciousness. 

We have chains of material nerve processes to which 
eventually a link becomes attached that is attended with 
conscious perception. This is sufficiently established from 


' See quotation from Bonnet, p. 54 of this volume. By ‘“ pre- 
serving the memory of habitual actions ’”’ Professor Hering probably 
means, retains for a long while and repeats motion of a certain 
character when such motion has been once communicated to it. 


Translation from Hering Lo 


the standpoint of the physiologist, and is also proved by 
our unconsciousness of many whole series of ideas and 
of the inferences we draw from them. If the soul is not 
to slip through the fingers of physiology, she must hold 
fast to the considerations suggested by our unconscious 
states. As far, however, as the investigations of the pure 
physicist are concerned, the unconscious and matter are 
one and the same thing, and the physiology of the un- 
conscious is no ‘‘ philosophy of the unconscious.” 

By far the greater number of our movements are the 
result of long and arduous practice. The harmonious co- 
operation of the separate muscles, the finely’ adjusted 
measure of participation which each contributes to the 
working of the whole, must, as a rule, have been laboriously 
acquired, in respect of most of the movements that are 
necessary in order to effect it. How long does it not take 
each note to find its way from the eyes to the fingers of 
one who is beginning to learn the pianoforte ; and, on the 
other hand, what an astonishing performance is the playing 
of the professional pianist. The sight of each note occasions 
the corresponding movement of the fingers with the speed 
of thought—a hurried glance at the page of music before 
him suffices to give rise to a whole series of harmonies ; 
nay, when a melody has been long practised, it can be 
played even while the player’s attention is being given 
to something of a perfectly different character over and 
above his music. 

The will need now no longer wend its way to each 
individual finger before the desired movements can be 
extorted from it ; no longer now does a sustained attention 
keep watch over the movements of each limb; the will 
need exercise a supervising control only. At the word of 
command the muscles become active, with a due regard 
to time and proportion, and go on working, so long as they 
are bidden to keep in their accustomed groove, while a 
slight hint on the part of the will, will indicate to them their 
further journey. How could all this be if every part of 


f 


7 4. Unconscious Memory 


the central nerve system, by means of which movement 
is effected, were not able! to reproduce whole series of 
vibrations, which at an earlier date required the constant 
and continuous participation of consciousness, but which 
are now set in motion automatically on a mere touch, as it 
were, from consciousness—if it were not able to reproduce 
them the more quickly and easily in proportion to the 
frequency of the repetitions—if, in fact, there was no 
power of recollecting earlier performances? Our per- 
ceptive faculties must have remained always at their 
lowest stage if we had been compelled to build up con- 
sciously every process from the details of the sensation- 
causing materials tendered to us by our senses ; nor could 
our voluntary movements have got beyond the helplessness 
of the child, if the necessary impulses could only be im- 
parted to every movement through effort of the will 
and conscious reproduction of all the corresponding 
ideas—if, in a word, the motor nerve system had not also 
its memory,” though that memory is unperceived by 
ourselves. The power of this memory is what is called 
“ the force of habit.”’ 

It seems, then, that we owe to memory almost all that 
we either have or are; that our ideas and conceptions 
are its work, and that our every perception, thought, and 
movement is derived from this source. Memory collects 
the countless phenomena of our existence into a single 
whole ; and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust 
of their component atoms if they were not held together 
by the attraction of matter, so our consciousness would 


1 It should not be “‘if the central nerve system were not able to 
reproduce whole series of vibrations,’’ but ‘‘if whole series of vibra- 
tions do not persist though unperceived,’’ if Professor Hering intends 
what I suppose him to intend. 

* Memory was in full operation for so long a time before any- 
thing like what we call a nervous system can be detected, that 
Professor Hering must not be supposed to be intending to confine 
memory to a motor nerve system. His words do not even imply 
that he does, but itis as well to be on one’s guard. 


Translation from Hering Pe 


be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived 
seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory. 

We have already repeatedly seen that the reproductions 
of organic processes, brought about by means of the memory 
of the nervous system, enter but partly within the domain 
of consciousness, remaining unperceived in other and not 
less important respects. This is also confirmed by numer- 
ous facts in the life of that part of the nervous system 
which ministers almost exclusively to our unconscious life 
processes. For the memory of the so-called sympathetic 
ganglionic system is no less rich than that of the brain 
and spinal marrow, and a great part of the medical art 
consists in making wise use of the assistance thus afforded 
us. 

To bring, however, this part of my observations to a 
_ Close, I will take leave of the nervous system, and glance 
hurriedly at other phases of organised matter, where we 
meet with the same powers of reproduction, but in simpler 
guise. 

Daily experience teaches us that a muscle becomes the 
stronger the more we use it. The muscular fibre, which 
in the first instance may have answered but feebly to the 
stimulus conducted to it by the motor nerve, does so with 
the greater energy the more often it is stimulated, pro- 
vided, of course, that reasonable times are allowed for 
repose. After each individual action it becomes more 
capable, more disposed towards the same kind of work, and 
has a greater aptitude for repetition of the same organic 
processes. It gains also in weight, for it assimilates more 
matter than when constantly at rest. We have here, in 
its simplest form, and in a phase which comes home most 
closely to the comprehension of the physicist, the same 
power of reproduction which we encountered when we 
were dealing with nerve substance, but under such far 
more complicated conditions. And what is known thus 
certainly from muscle substance holds good with greater 
or less plainness for all our organs. More especially may 


76 Unconscious Memory 


we note the fact, that after increased use, alternated with 
times of repose, there accrues to the organ in all animal 
economy an increased power of execution with an increased 
power of assimilation and a gain in size. 

This gain in size consists not only in the enlargement 
of the individual cells or fibres of which the organ is 
composed, but in the multiplication of their number ; 
for when cells have grown to a certain size they give rise 
to others, which inherit more or less completely the 
qualities of those from which they came, and therefore 
appear to be repetitions of the same cell. This growth 
and multiplication of cells is only a special phase of those 
manifold functions which characterise organised matter, 
and which consist not only in what goes on within the 
cell substance as alterations or undulatory movement of 
the molecular disposition, but also in that which becomes 
visible outside the cells as change of shape, enlargement, 
or subdivision. Reproduction of performance, therefore, 
manifests itself to us as reproduction of the cells them- 
selves, as may be seen most plainly in the case of plants, 
whose chief work consists in growth, whereas with animal 
organism other faculties greatly preponderate. 

Let us now take a brief survey of a class of facts in the 
case of which we may most abundantly observe the power 
of memory in organised matter. We have ample evidence 
of the fact that characteristics of an organism may descend 
to offspring which the organism did not inherit, but which 
it acquired owing to the special circumstances under 
which it lived ; and that, in consequence, every organism 
imparts to the germ that issues from it a small heritage of 
acquisitions which it has added during its own lifetime 
to the gross inheritance of its race. 

When we reflect that we are dealing with the heredity 
of acquired qualities which came to development in the 
most diverse parts of the parent organism, it must seem 
in a high degree mysterious how those parts can have any 
kind of influence upon a germ which develops itself in an 


Translation from Hering a7 


entirely different place. Many mystical theories have been 
propounded for the elucidation of this question, but the 
following reflections may serve to bring the cause nearer 
to the comprehension of the physiologist. 

The nerve substance, in spite of its thousandfold sub- 
division as cells and fibres, forms, nevertheless, a united 
whole, which is present directly in all organs—nay, as 
more recent histology conjectures, in each cell of the more 
important organs—or is at least in ready communication 
with them by means of the living, irritable, and therefore 
highly conductive substance of other cells. Through the 
connection thus established all organs find themselves in 
such a condition of more or less mutual interdependence 
upon one another, that events which happen to one are 
repeated in others, and a notification, however slight, 
of a vibration set up? in one quarter is at once conveyed 
even to the farthest parts of the body. With this easy 
and rapid intercourse between all parts is associated the 
more difficult communication that goes on by way of 
the circulation of sap or blood. 

We see, further, that the process of the development 
of all germs that are marked out for independent existence 
causes a powerful reaction, even from the very beginning 
of that existence, on both the conscious and unconscious 
life of the whole organism. We may see this from the fact 
that the organ of reproduction stands in closer and more 
important relation to the remaining parts, and especially 
to the nervous system, than do the other organs ; and, 
inversely, that both the perceived and unperceived events 
affecting the whole organism find a more marked response 
in the reproductive system than elsewhere. 

We can now see with sufficient plainness in what the 
material connection is established between the acquired 


1 It is from such passages as this, and those that follow on the 
next few pages, that I collect the impression of Professor Hering’s 
meaning which I have endeavoured to convey in the preceding 
chapter, 


78 Unconscious Memory 


peculiarities of an organism, and the proclivity on the 
part of the germ in virtue of which it develops the special 
characteristics of its parent. 

The microscope teaches us that no difference can be 
perceived between one germ and another; it cannot, 
however, be objected on this account that the determining 
cause of its ulterior development must be something 
immaterial, rather than the specific kind of its material 
constitution. 

The curves and surfaces which the mathematician 
conceives, or finds conceivable, are more varied and infinite 
than the forms of animal life. Let us suppose an infinitely 
small segment to be taken from every possible curve ; each 
one of these will appear as like every other as one germ 
is to another, yet the whole of every curve lies dormant, 
as it were, in each of them, and if the mathematician 
chooses to develop it, it will take the path indicated by 
the elements of each segment. 

It is an error, therefore, to suppose that such fine dis- 
tinctions as physiology must assume lie beyond the limits 
of what is conceivable by the human mind. An infinitely 
small change of position on the part of a point, or in the 
relations of the parts of a segment of a curve to one another, 
suffices to alter the law of its whole path, and so in like 
manner an infinitely small influence exercised by the 
parent organism on the molecular disposition of the 
germ + may suffice to produce a determining effect upon 
its whole farther development. 

What is the descent of special peculiarities but a re- 
production on the part of organised matter of processes 
in which it once took part as a germ in the germ-containing 
organs of its parent, and of which it seems still to retain 
a recollection that reappears when time and the occasion 
serve, inasmuch as it responds to the same or like stimuli 


* That is to say, ‘ an infinitely small change in the kind of vibra- 
tion communicated from the parent to the germ.” 


Translation from Hering 79 


in a like way to that in which the parent organism re- 
sponded, of which it was once part, and in the events 
of whose history it was itself also an accomplice ? 1 When 
an action through long habit or continual practice has 
become so much a second nature to any organisation that 
its effects will penetrate, though ever so faintly, into the 
germ that lies within it, and when this last comes to find 
itself in a new sphere, to extend itself, and develop into 
a new creature—(the individual parts of which are still 
always the creature itself and flesh of its flesh, so that 
what is reproduced is the same being as that in company 
with which the germ once lived, and of which it was once 
actually a part)—all this is as wonderful as when a grey- 
haired man remembers the events of his own childhood ; 
but it is not more so. Whether we say that the same 
organised substance is again reproducing its past experi- 
ence, or whether we prefer to hold that an offshoot or part 
of the original substance has waxed and developed itself 
since separation from the parent stock, it is plain that this 
will constitute a difference of degree, not kind. 

When we reflect upon the fact that unimportant acquired 
characteristics can be reproduced in offspring, we are apt 
to forget that offspring is only a full-sized reproduction 
of the parent—a reproduction, moreover, that goes as far 
as possible into detail. We are so accustomed to consider 
family resemblance a matter of course, that we are some- 
times surprised when a child is in some respect unlike 
its parent ; surely, however, the infinite number of points 


1 It may be asked what is meant by responding. I may repeat 
that I understand Professor Hering to mean that there exists in the 
offspring certain vibrations, which are many of them too faint to 
upset equilibrium and thus generate action, until they receive an 
accession of force from without by the running into them of vibra- 
tions of similar characteristics to their own, which last vibrations 
have been set up by exterior objects. On this they become strong 
enough to generate that corporeal earthquake which we call action. 

This may be true or not, but it is at any rate intelligible ; whereas 
much that is written about “‘ fraying channels’’ raises no definite 
ideas in the mind. 


80 Unconscious Memory 


in respect of which parents and children resemble one 
another is a more reasonable ground for our surprise. 

But if the substance of the germ can reproduce charac-. 
teristics acquired by the parent during its single life, how 
much more will it not be able to reproduce those that were 
congenital to the parent, and which have happened through 
countless generations to the organised matter of which 
the germ of to-day is a fragment? We cannot wonder 
that action already taken on innumerable past occasions 
by organised matter is more deeply impressed upon the 
recollection of the germ to which it gives rise than action 
taken once only during a single lifetime. 

We must bear in mind that every organised being now 
in existence represents the last link of an inconceivably 
long series of organisms, which come down in a direct line 
of descent, and of which each has inherited a part of the 
acquired characteristics of its predecessor. Everything, 
furthermore, points in the direction of our believing that 
at the beginning of this chain their existed an organism 
of the very simplest kind, something, in fact, like those 
which we call organised germs. The chain of living beings 
thus appears to be the magnificent achievement of the 
reproductive power of the original organic structure from 
which they have all descended. As this subdivided itself 
and transmitted its characteristics 2 to its descendants, 
these acquired new ones, and in their turn transmitted 
them—all new germs transmitting the chief part of what 
had happened to their predecessors, while the remaining 
part lapsed out of their memory, circumstances not stimu- 
lating it to reproduce itself. 

An organised being, therefore, stands before us a product 


* I interpret this, “‘ We cannot wonder if often-repeated vibra- 
tions gather strength, and become at once more lasting and requir- 
ing less accession of vibration from without, in order to become 
strong enough to generate action.”’ 

2 “Characteristics”? must, I imagine, according to Professor 
Hering, resolve themselves ultimately into ‘‘ vibrations,” for the 
characteristics depend upon the character of the vibrations. 


Translation from Hering Sy 


of the unconscious memory of organised matter, which, 
ever increasing and ever dividing itself, ever assimilating 
new matter and returning it in changed shape to the inor- 
ganic world, ever receiving some new thing into its memory, 
and transmitting its acquisitions by the way of reproduc- 
tion, grows continually richer and richer the longer it lives. 

Thus regarded, the development of one of the more 
highly organised animals represents a continuous series of 
organised recollections concerning the past development 
of the great chain of living forms, the last link of which 
stands before us in the particular animal we may be con- 
sidering. Asa complicated perception may arise by means 
of a rapid and superficial reproduction of long and labori- 
ously practised brain processes, so a germ in the course 
of its development hurries through a series of phases, 
hinting at them only. Often and long foreshadowed in 
theories of varied characters, this conception has only 
now found correct exposition from a naturalist of our own 
time. For Truth hides herself under many disguises from 
those who seek her, but in the end stands unveiled before 
the eyes of him whom she has chosen. 

Not only is there a reproduction of form, outward and 
inner conformation of body, organs, and cells, but the 
habitual actions of the parent are also reproduced. The 
chicken on emerging from the eggshell runs off as its 
mother ran off before it; yet what an extraordinary 
complication of emotions and sensations is necessary in 
order to preserve equilibrium in running. Surely the 
supposition of an inborn capacity for the reproduction 
of these intricate actions can alone explain the facts. As 
habitual practice becomes a second nature to the individual 
during his single lifetime, so the often-repeated action of 
each generation becomes a second nature to the race. 


+ Professor Hartog tells me that this probably refers to Fritz 
Miiller’s formulation of the “recapitulation process’”’ in ‘‘ Facts 
for Darwin,’ English edition (1869), p. 114.—WNote by R. A. 
Streatfeild in Edition of 1910. 


G 


8 2 Unconscious Memory 


The chicken not only displays great dexterity in the 
performance of movements for the effecting of which it 
has an innate capacity, but it exhibits also a tolerably 
high perceptive power. It immediately picks up any grain 
that may be thrown to it. Yet, in order to do this, more 
is wanted than a mere visual perception of the grains ; 
there must be an accurate apprehension of the direction 
and distance of the precise spot in which each grain is 
lying, and there must be no less accuracy in the adjustment 
of the movements of the head and of the whole body. The 
chicken cannot have gained experience in these respects 
while it was still in the egg. It gained it rather from the 
thousands of thousands of beings that have lived before it, 
and from which it is directly descended. 

The memory of organised substance displays itself here 
in the most surprising fashion. The gentle stimulus of 
the light proceeding from the grain that affects the retina 
of the chicken,! gives occasion for the reproduction of a 
many-linked chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions, 
which were never yet brought together in the case of the 
individual before us. We are accustomed to regard these 
surprising performances of animals as manifestations of 
what we call instinct, and the mysticism of natural 
philosophy has ever shown a predilection for this theme ; 
but if we regard instinct as the outcome of the memory 
or reproductive power of organised substance, and if we 
ascribe a memory to the race as we already ascribe it 
to the individual, then instinct becomes at once intelligible, 
and the physiologist at the same time finds a point of 
contact which will bring it into connection with the great 
series of facts indicated above as phenomena of the 
reproductive faculty. Here, then, we have a physical 


1 This is the passage which makes me suppose Professor Hering 
to mean that vibrations from exterior objects run into vibrations 
already existing within the living body, and that the accession to 
power thus derived is his key to an explanation of the physical 
basis of action. 


Translation from Hering 83 


explanation which has not, indeed, been given yet, but 
the time for which appears to be rapidly approaching. 

When, in accordance with its instinct, the caterpillar 
becomes a chrysalis, or the bird builds its nest, or the bee 
its cell, these creatures act consciously and not as blind 
machines. They know how to vary their proceedings 
within certain limits in conformity with altered circum- 
stances, and they are thus liable to make mistakes. They 
feel pleasure when their work advances and pain if it is 
hindered ; they learn by the experience thus acquired, 
and build on a second occasion better than on the first ; 
but that even in the outset they hit so readily upon the 
most judicious way of achieving their purpose, and that 
their movements adapt themselves so admirably and 
automatically to the end they have in view—surely this 
is owing to the inherited acquisitions of the memory of 
their nerve substance, which requires but a touch and it 
will fall at once to the most appropriate kind of activity, 
thinking always, and directly, of whatever it is that may 
be wanted. 

Man can readily acquire surprising kinds of dexterity 
if he confines his attention to their acquisition. Special- 
isation is the mother of proficiency. He who marvels 
at the skill with which the spider weaves her web should 
bear in mind that she did not learn her art all on a sudden, 
but that innumerable generations of spiders acquired it 
toilsomely and step by step—this being about all that, as 
a general rule, they did acquire. Man took to bows and 
arrows if his nets failed him—the spider starved. Thus we 
see the body and—what most concerns us—the whole 
nervous system of the new-born animal constructed before- 
hand, and, as it were, ready attuned for intercourse with 
the outside world in which it is about to play its part, by 
means of its tendency to respond to external stimuli in the 
same manner as it has often heretofore responded in the 
persons of its ancestors. 

We naturally ask whether the brain and nervous system 


84 Unconscious Memory 


of the human infant are subjected to the principles we 
have laid down above? Man certainly finds it difficult to 
acquire arts of which the lower animals are born masters ; 
but the brain of man at birth is much farther from its 
highest development than is the brain of an animal. 
It not only grows for a longer time, but it becomes stronger 
than that of other living beings. The brain of man may 
be said to be exceptionally young at birth. The lower 
animal is born precocious, and acts precociously; it 
resembles those infant prodigies whose brain, as it were, 
is born old into the world, but who, in spite of, or rather 
in addition to, their rich endowment at birth, in after life 
develop as much mental power as others who were less 
splendidly furnished to start with, but born with greater 
freshness of youth. Man’s brain, and indeed his whole 
body, affords greater scope for individuality, inasmuch 
as a relatively greater part of it is of post-natal growth. 
It develops under the influence of impressions made by 
the enviroment upon its senses, and thus makes its 
acquisitions in a more special and individual manner, 
whereas the animal receives them ready made, and of a 
more final, stereotyped character. 

Nevertheless, it is plain we must ascribe both to the 
brain and body of the new-born infant a far-reaching 
power of remembering or reproducing things which have 
already come to their development thousands of times 
over in the persons of its ancestors. It is in virtue of this 
that it acquires proficiency in the actions necessary for 
its existence—so far as it was not already at birth pro- 
ficient in them—much more quickly and easily than would 
be otherwise possible ; but what we call instinct in the 
case of animals takes in man the looser form of aptitude, 
talent, and genius. Granted that certain ideas are not 


1 Tinterpret this: ‘‘ There are fewer vibrations persistent within 
the bodies of the lower animals ; those that there are, therefore, are 
stronger and more capable of generating action or upsetting the 
status in quo, Hence also they require less accession of vibration 


Translation from Hering 85 


innate, yet the fact of their taking form so easily and 
certainly from out of the chaos of his sensations, is due 
not to his own labour, but to that of the brain substance of 
the thousands of thousands of generations from whom he 
is descended. Theories concerning the development of 
individual consciousness which deny heredity or the power 
of transmission, and insist upon an entirely fresh start for 
every human soul, as though the infinite number of genera- 
tions that have gone before us might as well have never 
lived for all the effect they have had upon ourselves,— 
such theories will contradict the facts of our daily ex- 
perience at every touch and turn. 

The brain processes and phenomena of consciousness 
which ennoble man in the eyes of his fellows have had a 
less ancient history than those connected with his physical 
needs. Hunger and the reproductive instinct affected 
the oldest and the simplest forms of the organic world. Itis 
in respect of these instincts, therefore, and of the means 
to gratify them, that the memory of organised substance 
is strongest—the impulses and instincts that arise hence 
having still paramount power over the minds of men. 
The spiritual life has been superadded slowly ; its most 
splendid outcome belongs to the latest epoch in the history 
of organised matter, nor has any very great length of time 
elapsed since the nervous system was first crowned with the 
glory of a large and well-developed brain. 

Oral tradition and written history have been called the 
memory of man, and this is not without its truth. But 
there is another and a living memory in the innate re- 
productive power of brain substance, and without this 
both writings and oral tradition would be without signifi- 
cance to posterity. The most sublime ideas, though never 


from without. Manis agitated by more and more varied vibrations ; 
these, interfering, as to some extent they must, with one another, 
are weaker, and therefore require more accession from without 
before they can set the mechanical adjustments of the body in 
motion.” 


86 Unconscious Memory 


so immortalised in speech or letters, are yet nothing for 
heads that are out of harmony with them: they must 
be not only heard, but reproduced ; and both speech and 
writing would be in vain were there not an inheritance 
of inward and outward brain development, growing in 
correspondence with the inheritance of ideas that are 
handed down from age to age, and did not an enhanced 
capacity for their reproduction on the part of each succeed- 
ing generation accompany the thoughts that have been 
preserved in writing. Man’s conscious memory comes to 
an end at death, but the unconscious memory of Nature 
is true and ineradicable: whoever succeeds in stamping 
upon her the impress of his work, she will remember him 
to the end of time. 


Chapter VII 


Introduction to a translation of the chapter upon instinct in 
Von Hartmann’s ‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious.” 


AM afraid my readers will find the chapter on instinct 
from Von Hartmann’s “ Philosophy of the Uncon- 
scious,” which will now follow, as distasteful to read as I did 
to translate, and would gladly have spared it them if I could. 
At present the works of Mr. Sully, who has treated of the 
‘Philosophy of the Unconscious ” both in the Westminster 
Review (vol. xlix. N.S.) and in his work “‘ Pessimism,” are 
the best source to which English readers can have recourse 
for information concerning Von Hartmann. Giving him 
all credit for the pains he has taken with an ungrateful, 
if not impossible subject, I think that a sufficient sample 
of Von Hartmann’s own words will be a useful adjunct 
to Mr. Sully’s work, and may perhaps save some readers 
trouble by resolving them to look no farther into the 
‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious.” Over and above 
this, I have been so often told that the views concerning 
unconscious action contained in the foregoing lecture 
and in ‘“ Life and Habit”? are only the very fallacy of 
Von Hartmann over again, that I should like to give the 
public an opportunity of seeing whether this is so or no, 
by placing the two contending theories of unconscious 
action side by side. I hope that it will thus be seen that 
neither Professor Hering nor I have fallen into the fallacy 
of Von Hartmann, but that rather Von Hartmann has 
fallen into his fallacy through failure to grasp the principle 
which Professor Hering has insisted upon, and to connect 
heredity with memory. 
Professor Hering’s philosophy of the unconscious is of 


87 


88 Unconscious Memory 


extreme simplicity. He rests upon a fact of daily and 
hourly experience, namely, that practice makes things 
easy that were once difficult, and often results in their 
being done without any consciousness of effort. But if 
the repetition of an act tends ultimately, under certain 
circumstances, to its being done unconsciously, so also 
is the fact of an intricate and difficult action being done 
unconsciously an argument that it must have been done 
repeatedly already. . As I said in “‘ Life and Habit,” it is 
more easy to suppose that occasions on which such an 
action has been performed have not been wanting, even 
though we do not see when and where they were, than 
that the facility which we observe should have been at- 
tained without practice and memory (p. 56). 

There can be nothing better established or more easy, 
whether to understand or verify, than the unconsciousness 
with which habitual actions come to be performed. If, 
however, it is once conceded that it is the manner of 
habitual action generally, then all 4 priori objection to 
Professor Hering’s philosophy of the unconscious is at 
an end. The question becomes one of fact in individual 
cases, and of degree. 

How far, then, does the principle of the convertibility, as 
it were, of practice and unconsciousness extend? Can 
any line be drawn beyond which it shall cease to 
operate? If not, may it not have operated and be operat- 
ing to a vast and hitherto unsuspected extent? This 
is all, and certainly it is sufficiently simple. I some- 
times think it has found its greatest stumbling-block 
in its total want of mystery, as though we must be like 
those conjurers whose stock in trade is a small deal table 
and a kitchen-chair with bare legs, and who, with their 
parade of “no deception” and ‘“‘ examine everything for 
yourselves,’’ deceive worse than others who make use of 
all manner of elaborate paraphernalia. It is true we 
require no paraphernalia, and we produce unexpected 
results, but we are not conjuring. 


Introduction to Von Hartmann 89 


To turn now to Von Hartmann. When I read Mr. Sully’s 
article in the Westminster Review, I did not know whether 
the sense of mystification which it produced in me was 
wholly due to Von Hartmann or no ; but on making ac- 
quaintance with Von Hartmann himself, I found that Mr. 
Sully has erred, if at all, in making him more intelligible 
than he actually is. Von Hartmann has not gota meaning. 
Give him Professor Hering’s key and he might get one, 
but it would be at the expense of seeing what approach he 
had made to a system fallen to pieces. Granted that in 
his details and subordinate passages he often both has 
and conveys a meaning, there is, nevertheless, no coherence 
between these details, and the nearest approach to a broad 
conception covering the work which the reader can carry 
away with him is at once so incomprehensible and repulsive, 
that it is difficult to write about it without saying more, 
perhaps, than those who have not seen the original will 
accept as likely to be true. The idea to which I refer is 
that of an unconscious clairvoyance, which, from the 
language continually used concerning it, must be of the 
nature of a person, and which is supposed to take possession 
of living beings so fully as to be the very essence of their 
nature, the promoter of their embryonic development, 
and the instigator of their instinctive actions. This 
approaches closely to the personal God of Mosaic and 
Christian theology, with the exception that the word 
‘clairvoyance’! is substituted for God, and that the 
God is supposed to be unconscious. 

Mr. Sully says :— 


When we grasp it [the philosophy of Von Hartmann] 
as a whole it amounts to nothing more than this, that all 
or nearly all the phenomena of the material and spiritual 
world rest upon and result from a mysterious, unconscious 
being, though to call it being is really to add on an idea 
not immediately contained within the all-sufficient principle. 


1 1 am obliged to Mr. Sully for this excellent translation of 
‘* Hellsehen.”’ 


gO Unconscious Memory 


But what difference is there between this and saying that 
the phenomena of the world at large come we know not 
whence ?... . The unconscious, therefore, tends to be a 
simple phrase and nothing more... . . No doubt there are 
a number of mental processes .... of which we are un- 
conscious, . . . . but to infer from this that they are due to 
an unconscious power, and to proceed to demonstrate them 
in the presence of the unconscious through all nature, is to 
make an unwarrantable saltus in reasoning. What, in fact, 
is this ‘‘ unconscious ” but a high-sounding name to veil our 
ignorance? Is the unconscious any better explanation of 
phenomena we do not understand than the ‘“‘ devil-devil,” by 
which Australian tribes explain the Leyden jar and its phe- 
nomena ? Does it increase our knowledge to know that 
we do not know the origin of language or the cause of in- 
stinct ? ... . Alike in organic creation and the evolution of 
history ‘‘ performances and actions ’’—the words are those of 
Strauss—are ascribed to an unconscious, which can only 
belong to a conscious being.} 


The difficulties of the system advance as we proceed.? 
Subtract this questionable factor—the unconscious—from 
Hartmann’s ‘“‘ Biology and Psychology,” and the chapters 
remain pleasant and instructive reading. But with the third 
part of his work—the Metaphysic of the Unconscious—our 
feet are clogged at every step. We are encircled by the 
merest play of words, the most unsatisfactory demonstra- 
tions, and most inconsistent inferences. The theory of 
final causes has been hitherto employed to show the wisdom 
of the world ; with our Pessimist philosopher it shows nothing 
but its irrationality and misery. Consciousness has been 
generally supposed to be the condition of all happiness and 
interest in life ; here it simply awakens us to misery, and the 
lower an animal lies in the scale of conscious life, the better 
and the pleasanter its lot. 


e 


Thus, then, the universe, as an emanation of the uncon- 
scious, has been constructed.* Throughout it has been 
marked by design, by purpose, by finality; throughout a 
wonderful adaptation of means to ends, a wonderful adjust- 
ment and relativity in different portions has been noticed— 


* Westminster Review, New Series, vol. xlix. p. 143. 
* 1 Did A Dildos a) Tie Dk 5 te 


Introduction to Von Hartmann 9g1 


and all this for what conclusion ? Not, as in the hands of 
the natural theologians of the eighteenth century, to show 
that the world is the result of design, of an intelligent, bene- 
ficent Creator, but the manifestation of a Being whose only 
predicates are negatives, whose very essence is to be un- 
conscious. It is not only like ancient Athens, to an unknown, 
but to an unknowing God, that modern Pessimism rears its 
altar. Yetsurely the fact that the motive principle of existence 
moves in a mysterious way outside our consciousness no 
way requires that the All-one Being should be himself un- 
conscious. 


I believe the foregoing to convey as correct an idea of 
Von Hartmann’s system as it is possible to convey, and 
will leave it to the reader to say how much in common 
there is between this and the lecture given in the preceding 
chapter, beyond the fact that both touch upon unconscious 
actions. The extract which will form my next chapter 
is only about a thirtieth part of the entire ‘‘ Philosophy 
of the Unconscious,” but it will, I believe, suffice to sub- 
stantiate the justice of what Mr. Sully has said in the pass- 
ages above quoted. 

As regards the accuracy of the translation, I have 
submitted all passages about which I was in the least 
doubtful to the same gentleman who revised my transla- 
tion of Professor Hering’s lecture ; I have also given the 
German wherever I thought the reader might be glad to 
see it. 


Chapter VIII 


Translation of the chapter on ‘“‘ The Unconscious in Instinct,”’ 
from Von Hartmann’s “‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious.” 


ON HARTMANN’S chapter on instinct is as follows:— 
Instinct is action taken in pursuance of a purpose, 
but without conscious perception of what the purpose is.* 
A purposive action, with consciousness of the purpose, 
and where the course taken is the result of deliberation, 
is not said to be instinctive; nor yet, again, is blind, 
aimless action, such as outbreaks of fury on the part of 
offended or otherwise enraged animals. I see no occasion 
for disturbing the commonly received definition of instinct 
as given above; for those who think they can refer all 
the so-called ordinary instincts of animals to conscious 
deliberation 1fso facto deny that there is such a thing as 
instinct at all, and should strike the word out of their 
vocabulary. But of this more hereafter. 
Assuming, then, the existence of instinctive action as 
above defined, it can be explained as— 
I. A mere necessary consequence of bodily organisation. ? 
II. A mechanism of brain or mind contrived by nature. 
III. The outcome of an unconscious activity of mind. 
In neither of the two first cases is there any scope for 
the idea of purpose ; in the third, purpose must be present 
immediately before the action. In the two first cases, 


1 “Instinct ist zweckmassiges Handeln ohne Bewusstsein des 
Zwecks.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,’’ 3d ed., Berlin, 1871, 
Pp. 70. 

2 “7, Eine blosse Folge der kérperlichen Organisation. 

“2, Ein von der Natur eingerichteter Gehirn oder Geistes- 
mechanismus. 

“3. Eine Folge unbewusster Geistesthatigkeit.’’—‘‘ Phil- 
osophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 70. 


92 


Translation from Von Hartmann 93 


action is supposed to be brought about by means of an 
initial arrangement, either of bodily or mental mechanism, 
purpose being conceived of as existing on a single occasion 
only—that is to say, in the determination of the initial 
arrangement. In the third, purpose is conceived as present 
in every individual instance. Let us proceed to the 
consideration of these three cases. 

Instinct is not a mere consequence of bodily organisation ; 
for— 

(a.) Bodies may be alike, yet they may be endowed 
with different instincts. 

All spiders have the same spinning apparatus, but one 
kind weaves radiating webs, another irregular ones, while 
a third makes none at all, but lives in holes, whose walls 
it overspins, and whose entrance it closes with a door. 
Almost all birds have a like organisation for the con- 
struction of their nests (a beak and feet), but how infinitely 
do their nests vary in appearance, mode of construction, 
attachment to surrounding objects (they stand, are glued 
on, hang, &c.), selection of site (caves, holes, corners, 
forks of trees, shrubs, the ground), and excellence of 
workmanship ; how often, too, are they not varied in the 
species of a single genus, as of pavus. Many birds, more- 
over, build no nest at all. The differences in the songs of 
birds are in like manner independent of the special con- 
struction of their voice apparatus, nor do the modes of 
nest construction that obtain among ants and bees depend 
upon their bodily organisation. Organisation, as a general 
rule, only renders the bird capable of singing, as giving it 
an apparatus with which to sing at all, but it has nothing 
to do with the specific character of the execution... . 
The nursing, defence, and education of offspring cannot be 
considered as in any way more dependent upon bodily 
organisation; nor yet the sites which insects choose for 
the laying of their eggs; nor, again, the selection of 
deposits of spawn, of their own species, by male fish for 
impregnation. The rabbit burrows, the hare does not, 


94 Unconscious Memory 


though both have the same burrowing apparatus. The 
hare, however, has less need of a subterranean place of 
refuge by reason of its greater swiftness. Some birds, 
with excellent powers of flight, are nevertheless stationary 
in their habits, as the secretary falcon and certain other 
birds of prey ; while even such moderate fliers as quails 
are sometimes known to make very distant migrations. 

(0.) Like instincts may be found associated with unlike 
organs. 

Birds with and without feet adapted for climbing live 
in trees; so also do monkeys with and without flexible 
tails, squirrels, sloths, pumas, &c. Mole-crickets dig with 
a well-pronounced spade upon their fore-feet, while the 
burying-beetle does the same thing though it has no special 
apparatus whatever. The mole conveys its winter pro- 
vender in pockets, an inch long and half an inch wide, 
within its cheeks; the field-mouse does so without the 
help of any such contrivance. The migratory instinct. 
displays itself with equal strength in animals of widely 
different form, by whatever means they may pursue their 
journey, whether by water, land, or air. 

It is clear, therefore, that instinct is in great measure 
independent of bodily organisation. Granted, indeed, that 
a certain amount of bodily apparatus is a sine gua non for 
any power of execution at all—as, for example, that there 
would be no ingenious nest without organs more or less 
adapted for its construction, no spinning of a web without 
spinning glands—nevertheless, it is impossible to maintain 
that instinct is a consequence of organisation. The mere 
existence of the organ does not constitute even the smallest 
incentive to any corresponding habitual activity. <A 
sensation of pleasure must at least accompany the use of 
the organ before its existence can incite to its employment. 
And even so when a sensation of pleasure has given the 
impulse which is to render it active, it is only the fact of 
there being activity at all, and not the special character- 
istics of the activity, that can be due to organisation. 


Translation from Von Hartmann gs 


The reason for the special mode of the activity is the very 
problem that we have tosolve. Noone will call the action of 
the spider instinctive in voiding the fluid from her spinning 
gland when it is too full, and therefore painful to her ; 
nor that of the male fish when it does what amounts to 
much the same thing as this. The instinct and the marvel 
lie in the fact that the spider spins threads, and proceeds 
to weave her web with them, and that the male fish will 
only impregnate ova of his own species. 

Another proof that the pleasure felt in the employment 
of an organ is wholly inadequate to account for this em- 
ployment is to be found in the fact that the moral greatness 
of instinct, the point in respect of which it most commands 
our admiration, consists in the obedience paid to its 
behests, to the postponement of all personal well-being, 
and at the cost, it may be, of life itself. Ifthe mere pleasure 
of relieving certain glands from overfulness were the 
reason why caterpillars generally spin webs, they would 
go on spinning until they had relieved these glands, but 
they would not repair their work as often as any one 
destroyed it, and do this again and again until they die of 
exhaustion. The same holds good with the other instincts 
that at first sight appear to be inspired only by a sensation 
of pleasure ; for if we change the circumstances, so as to 
put self-sacrifice in the place of self-interest, it becomes at 
once apparent that they have a higher source than this. 
We think, for example, that birds pair for the sake of mere 
sexual gratification ; why, then, do they leave off pairing 
as soon as they have laid the requisite number of eggs ? 
That there is a reproductive instinct over and above the 
desire for sexual gratification appears from the fact that 
if a man takes an egg out of the nest, the birds will come 
together again and the hen will lay another egg; or, if 
they belong to some of the more wary species, they will 
desert their nest, and make preparation for an entirely new 
brood. A female wryneck, whose nest was daily robbed 
of the egg she laid in it, continued to lay a new one, which 


96 Unconscious Memory 


grew smaller and smaller, till, when she had laid her twenty- 
ninth egg, she was found dead upon her nest. If an instinct 
cannot stand the test of self-sacrifice—if it is the simple 
outcome of a desire for bodily gratification—then it is no 
true instinct, and is only so called erroneously. 

Instinct is not a mechanism of brain or mind implanted 
in living beings by nature ; for, if it were, then instinctive 
action without any, even unconscious, activity of mind, 
and with no conception concerning the purpose of the 
action, would be executed mechanically, the purpose 
having been once for all thought out by Nature or Provi- 
dence, which has so organised the individual that it acts 
henceforth as a purely mechanical medium. We are now 
dealing with a psychical organisation as the cause of 
instinct, aS we were above dealing with a physical. A 
psychical organisation would be a conceivable explanation, 
and we need look no further if every instinct once belonging 
to an animal discharged its functions in an unvarying 
manner. But this is never found to be the case, for all 
instincts vary when there arises a sufficient motive for 
varying them. This proves that special exterior circum- 
stances enter into the matter, and that these circumstances 
are the very things that render the attainment of the 
purpose possible through means selected by the instinct. 
Here first do we find instinct acting as though it were 
actually design with action following at its heels, for, 
until the arrival of the motive, the instinct’ remains latent 
and discharges no function whatever. The motive enters 
by way of an idea received into the mind through the in- 
strumentality of the senses, and there is a constant connec- 
tion between instinct in action and all sensual images 
which give information that an opportunity has arisen for 
attaining the ends proposed to itself by the instinct. 

The psychical mechanism of this constant connection 
must also be looked for. It may help us here to turn 
to the piano for an illustration. The struck keys are the 
motives, the notes that sound in consequence are the 


Translation from Von Hartmann 97 


instincts in action. This illustration might perhaps be 
allowed to pass (if we also suppose that entirely different 
keys can give out the same sound) if instincts could only 
be compared with distinctly tuned notes, so that one and 
the same instinct acted always in the same manner on 
the rising of the motive which should set it in action. This, 
however, is not so; for it is the blind unconscious purpose 
of the instinct that is alone constant, the instinct itself— 
that is to say, the will to make use of certain means— 
varying as the means that can be most suitably employed 
vary under varying circumstances. 

In this we condemn the theory which refuses to recog- 
nise unconscious purpose as present in each individual 
case of instinctive action. For he who maintains instinct 
to be the result of a mechanism of mind, must suppose 
a special and constant mechanism for each variation and 
modification of the instinct in accordance with exterior 
circumstances, that is to say, a new string giving a note 
with a new tone must be inserted, and this would involve 
the mechanism in endless complication. But the fact that 
the purpose is constant notwithstanding all manner of 
variation in the means chosen by the instinct, proves that 
there is no necessity for the supposition of such an elaborate 
mental mechanism—the presence of an unconscious pur- 
pose being sufficient to explain the facts. The purpose of 
the bird, for example, that has laid her eggs is constant, 
and consists in the desire to bring her young to maturity. 
When the temperature of the air is insufficient to effect 
this, she sits upon her eggs, and only intermits her sittings 
in the warmest countries; the mammal, on the other 
hand, attains the fulfilment of its instinctive purpose with- 


1 “ Hiermit ist der Annahme das Urtheil gesprochen, welche die 
unbewusste Vorstellung des Zwecks in jedem einzelnen Falle vor- 
wiegt; denn wollte man nun noch die Vorstellung des Geistes- 
mechanismus festhalten, so miisste fiir jede Variation und Modifica- 
tion des Instincts, nach den ausseren Umstanden, eine besondere 
constante Vorrichtung . . . eingefiigt sein,’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the 
Unconscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 74. 


H 


98 Unconscious Memory 


out any co-operation on its own part. In warm climates 
many birds only sit by night, and small exotic birds that 
have built in aviaries kept at a high temperature sit little 
upon their eggs or not at all. How inconceivable is the sup- 
position of a mechanism that impels the bird to sit as soon 
as the temperature falls below a certain height! How 
clear and simple, on the other hand, is the view that there 
is an unconscious purpose constraining the volition of the 
bird to the use of the fitting means, of which process, 
however, only the last link, that is to say, the will immedi- 
ately preceding the action falls within the consciousness 
of the bird! 

In South Africa the sparrow surrounds her nest with 
thorns as a defence against apes and serpents. The eggs 
of the cuckoo, as regards size, colour, and marking, in- 
variably resemble those of the birds in whose nests she 
lays. Sylvia rufa, for example, lays a white egg with 
violet spots ; Sylvia hippolais, a red one with black spots ; 
Regulus ignicapellus, a cloudy red; but the cuckoo’s egg 
is in each case so deceptive an imitation of its model, that 
it can hardly be distinguished except by the structure of 
its shell. 

Huber contrived that his bees should be unable to 
build in their usual instinctive manner, beginning from 
above and working downwards ; on this they began build- 
ing from below, and again horizontally. The outermost 
cells that spring from the top of the hive or abut against 
its sides are not hexagonal, but pentagonal, so as to gain 
in strength, being attached with one base instead of two 
sides. In autumn bees lengthen their existing honey cells 
if these are insufficient, but in the ensuing spring they 
again shorten them in order to get greater roadway between 
the combs. When the full combs have become too heavy, 
they strengthen the walls of the uppermost or bearing 
cells by thickening them with wax and propolis. If larvee 
of working bees are introduced into the cells set apart for 
drones, the working bees will cover these cells with the 


Translation from Von Hartmann gg 


flat lids usual for this kind of larva, and not with the round 
ones that are proper for drones. In autumn, as a general 
rule, bees kill their drones, but they refrain from doing 
this when they have lost their queen, and keep them to 
fertilise the young queen, who will be developed from 
larve that would otherwise have become working bees. 
Huber observed that they defend the entrance of their 
hive against the inroads of the sphinx moth by means 
of skilful constructions made of wax and propolis. They 
only introduce propolis when they want it for the execu- 
tion of repairs, or for some other special purpose. Spiders 
and caterpillars also display marvellous dexterity in the 
repair of their webs if they have been damaged, and this 
requires powers perfectly distinct from those requisite 
for the construction of a new one. 

The above examples might be multiplied indefinitely, 
but they are sufficient to establish the fact that instincts 
are not capacities rolled, as it were, off a reel mechanically, 
according to an invariable system, but that they adapt 
themselves most closely to the circumstances of each case 
and are capable of such great modification and variation 
that at times they almost appear to cease to be instinctive. 

Many will, indeed, ascribe these modifications to con- 
scious deliberation on the part of the animals themselves, 
and it is impossible to deny that in the case of the more 
intellectually gifted animals there may be such a thing as 
a combination of instinctive faculty and conscious re- 
flection. I think, however, the examples already cited 
are enough to show that often where the normal and the 
abnormal action springs from the same source, without 
any complication with conscious deliberation, they are 
either both instinctive or both deliberative.t Or is that 


1 “*TIndessen glaube ich, dass die angefihrten Beispiele zur 
Geniige beweisen, dass es auch viele Falle giebt, wo ohne jede Com- 
plication mit der bewussten Ueberlegung die gewodhnliche und 
aussergewOhnliche Handlung aus derselben Quelle stammen, dass 
sie entweder beide wirklicher Instinct, oder beide Resultate bewuss- 
ter Ueberlegung sind.’’—‘“‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., 


p. 76. 


LOO Unconscious Memory 


which prompts the bee to build hexagonal prisms in the 
middle of her comb something of an actually distinct char- 
acter from that which impels her to build pentagonal ones 
at the sides ? Are there two separate kinds of thing, one of 
which induces birds under certain circumstances to sit 
upon their eggs, while another leads them under certain 
other circumstances to refrain from doing so? And does 
this hold good also with bees when they at one time kill 
their brethren without mercy and at another grant them 
their lives? Or with birds when they construct the kind 
of nest peculiar to their race, and, again, any special 
provision which they may think fit under certain cir- 
cumstances to take? If it is once granted that the normal 
and the abnormal manifestations of instinct—and they 
are often incapable of being distinguished—spring from a 
single source, then the objection that the modification is 
due to conscious knowledge will be found to be a suicidal 
one later on, so far as it is directed against instinct generally. 
It may be sufficient here to point out, in anticipation of 
remarks that will be found in later chapters, that instinct 
and the power of organic development involve the same 
essential principle, though operating under different cir- 
cumstances—the two melting into one another without 
any definite boundary between them. Here, then, we 
have conclusive proof that instinct does not depend upon 
organisation of body or brain, but that, more truly, the 
organisation is due to the nature and manner of the 
instinct. 

On the other hand, we must now return to a closer 
consideration of the conception of a psychical mechanism. 
And here we find that this mechanism, in spite of its ex- 
plaining so much, is itself so obscure that we can hardly 
form any idea concerning it. The motive enters the mind 

1 “ Dagegen haben wir nunmehr unseren Blick noch einmal 
schairfer auf den Begriff eines psychischen Mechanismus zu richten, 
und da zeigt sich, dass derselbe, abgesehen davon, wie viel er erk- 


lart, so dunkel ist, dass man sich kaum etwas dabei denken kann.” 
—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 76. 


Translation from Von Hartmann ror 


by ways of a conscious sensual impression ; this is the 
first link of the process; the last link? appears as the 
conscious motive of an action. Both, however, are entirely 
unlike, and neither has anything to do with ordinary 
motivation, which consists exclusively in the desire that 
springs from a conception either of pleasure or dislike— 
the former prompting to the attainment of any object, 
the latter to its avoidance. In the case of instinct, plea- 
sure is for the most part a concomitant phenomenon ; 
but it is not so always, as we have already seen, inasmuch 
as the consummation and highest moral development of 
instinct displays itself in self-sacrifice. 

The true problem, however, lies far deeper than this. 
For every conception of a pleasure proves that we have 
experienced this pleasure already. But it follows from 
this, that when the pleasure was first felt there must have 
been will present, in the gratification of which will the 
pleasure consisted ; the question, therefore, arises, whence 
did the will come before the pleasure that would follow 
on its gratification was known, and before bodily pain, 
as, for example, of hunger, rendered relief imperative ? 
Yet we may see that even though an animal has grown 
up apart from any others of its kind, it will yet none 
the less manifest the instinctive impulses of its race, 
though experience can have taught it nothing whatever 
concerning the pleasure that will ensue upon their grati- 
fication. As regards instinct, therefore, there must be a 
causal connection between the motivating sensual con- 
ception and the will to perform the instinctive action, 
and the pleasure of the subsequent gratification has 
nothing to do with the matter. We know by the experi- 
ence of our own instincts that this causal connection does 


1 “ Das Endglied tritt als bewusster Wille zu irgend einer Hand- 
lung auf; beide sind aber ganz ungleichartig und haben mit der 
gewohnlichen Motivation nichts zu thun, welche ausschliesslich 
darin besteht, dass die Vorstellung einer Lust oder einer Unlust das 
Begehren erzeugt, erstere zu erlangen, letztere sich fern zu halten.”’ 
—Ibid., p. 76. 


102 Unconscious Memory 


not lie within our consciousness ;1 therefore, if it is to 
be a mechanism of any kind, it can only be either an un- 
conscious mechanical induction and metamorphosis of the 
vibrations of the conceived motive into the vibrations 
of the conscious action in the brain, or an unconscious 
spiritual mechanism. 

In the first case, it is surely strange that this process 
should go on unconsciously, though it is so powerful in 
its effects that the will resulting from it overpowers every 
other consideration, every other kind of will, and that 
vibrations of this kind, when set up in the brain, become 
always consciously perceived ; nor is it easy to conceive 
in what way this metamorphosis can take place so that 
the constant purpose can be attained under varying cir- 
cumstances by the resulting will in modes that vary with 
variation of the special features of each individual case. 

But if we take the other alternative, and suppose an 
unconscious mental mechanism, we cannot legitimately 
conceive of the process going on in this as other than what 
prevails in all mental mechanism, namely, than as by 
way of idea and will. We are, therefore, compelled to 
imagine a causal connection between the consciously 
recognised motive and the will to do the instinctive action, 
through unconscious idea and will; nor do I know how 
this connection can be conceived as being brought about 
more simply than through a conceived and willed pur- 
pose. Arrived at this point, however, we have attained 


1 “ Diese causale Verbindung fallt erfahrungsmassig, wie wir von 
unsern menschlichen Instincten wissen, nicht in’s Bewusstsein ; 
folglich kann dieselbe, wenn sie ein Mechanismus sein soll, nur ent- 
weder ein nicht in’s Bewusstsein fallende mechanische Leitung und 
Umwandlung der Schwingungen des vorgestellten Motivs in die 
Schwingungen der gewollten Handlung im Gehirn, oder ein unbe- 
wusster geistiger Mechanismus sein.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Un- 
conscious,” 3d ed., p. 77. 

2 ‘Man hat sich also zwischen dem bewussten Motiv, und dem 
Willen zur Instincthandlung eine causale Verbindung durch unbe- 
wusstes Vorstellen und Wollen zu denken, und ich weiss nicht, wie 
diese Verbindung einfacher gedacht werden k6énnte, als durch den 
vorgestellten und gewollten Zweck. Damit sind wir aber bei dem 


Translation from Von Hartmann 103 


the logical mechanism peculiar to and inseparable from 
all mind, and find unconscious purpose to be an indispen- 
sable link in every instinctive action. With this, therefore, 
the conception of a mental mechanism, dead and pre- 
destined from without, has disappeared, and has become 
transformed into the spiritual life inseparable from logic, 
so that we have reached the sole remaining requirement 
for the conception of an actual instinct, which proves 
to be a conscious willing of the means towards an uncon- 
sciously willed purpose. This conception explains clearly 
and without violence all the problems which instinct 
presents to us; or more truly, all that was problematical 
about instinct disappears when its true nature has been 
thus declared. If this work were confined to the considera- 
tion of instinct alone, the conception of an unconscious 
activity of mind might excite opposition, inasmuch as 
it is one with which our educated public is not yet familiar ; 
but in a work like the present, every chapter of which 
adduces fresh facts in support of the existence of such 
an activity and of its remarkable consequences, the 
novelty of the theory should be taken no farther into 
consideration. 

Though I so confidently deny that instinct is the simple 
action of a mechanism which has been contrived once 
for all, I by no means exclude the supposition that in the 
constitution of the brain, the ganglia, and the whole 
body, in respect of morphological as well as molecular- 
physiological condition, certain predispositions can be 
established which direct the unconscious intermediaries 


allen Geistern eigenthiimlichen und immanenten Mechanismus der 
Logik angelangt, und haben die unbewusste Zweckvorstellung bei 
jeder einzelnen Instincthandlung als unentbehrliches Glied gefunden ; 
hiermit hat also der Begriff des todten, ausserlich pradestinirten 
Geistesmechanismus sich selbst aufgehoben und in das immanente 
Geistesleben der Logik umgewandelt, und wir sind bei der letzten 
Moglichkeit angekommen, welche fiir die Auffassung eines wirk- 
lichen Instincts tibrig bleibt: der Instinct ist bewusstes Wollen des 
Mittels zu einem unbewusst gewollten Zweck.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the 
Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 73. 


104 Unconscious Memory 


more readily into one channel than into another. This 
predisposition is either the result of a habit which keeps 
continually cutting for itself a deeper and deeper channel, 
until in the end it leaves indelible traces whether in the 
individual or in the race, or it is expressly called into | 
being by the unconscious formative principle in genera- 
tion, so as to facilitate action in a given direction. This 
last will be the case more frequently in respect of exterior 
organisation—as, for example, with the weapons or 
working organs of animals—while to the former must be 
referred the molecular condition of brain and ganglia 
which brings about the perpetually recurring elements of 
an instinct such as the hexagonal shape of the cells of 
bees. We shall presently see that by individual character 
we mean the sum of the individual methods of reaction 
against all possible motives, and that this character de- 
pends essentially upon a constitution of mind and body 
acquired in some measure through habit by the individual, 
but for the most part inherited. But an instinct is also 
a mode of reaction against certain motives : here, too, 
then, we are dealing with character, though perhaps not 
so much with that of the individual as of the race; for 
by character in regard to instinct we do not intend the 
differences that distinguish individuals, but races, from 
one another. If any one chooses to maintain that such 
a predisposition for certain kinds of activity on the part 
of brain and body constitutes a mechanism, this may in 
one sense be admitted; but as against this view it must 
be remarked— 

I. [That such deviations from the normal scheme of 
an instinct as cannot be referred to conscious deliberation 
are not provided for by any predisposition in this mechanism. 

2. That heredity is only possible under the circumstances 
of a constant superintendence of the embryonic develop- 
ment by a purposive unconscious activity of growth. It 
must be admitted, however, that this is influenced in 
return by the predisposition existing in the germ. 


Translation from Von Hartmann 105 


3. That the impressing of the predisposition upon the 
individual from whom it is inherited can only be effected 
by long practice, consequently the instinct without 
auxiliary mechanism! is the originating cause of the 
auxiliary mechanism. 

4. That none of those instinctive actions that are per- 
formed rarely, or perhaps once only, in the lifetime of 
any individual—as, for example, those connected with 
the propagation and metamorphoses of the lower forms 
of life, and none of those instinctive omissions of action, 
neglect of which necessarily entails death—can be con- 
ceived as having become engrained into the character 
through habit ; the ganglionic constitution, therefore, that 
predisposes the animal towards them must have been 
fashioned purposively. 

5. That even the presence of an auxiliary mechanism? 
does not compel the unconscious to a particular corre- 
sponding mode of instinctive action, but only predisposes 
it. This is shown by the possibility of departure from the 
normal type of action, so that the unconscious purpose is 
always stronger than the ganglionic constitution, and 
takes any opportunity of choosing from several similar 
possible courses the one that is handiest and most con- 
venient to the constitution of the individual. 

We now approach the question that I have reserved 
for our final one,—Is there, namely, actually such a thing 
as instinct,? or are all so-called instinctive actions only 
the results of conscious deliberation ? 

In support of the second of these two views, it may be 


1“ Also der Instinct ohne Hilfsmechanismus die Ursache der 
Entstehung des Hiulfsmechanismus ist.’—‘‘ Philosophy of the 
Unconscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 79. 

2‘ Dass auch der fertige Hilfsmechanismus das Unbewusste 
nicht etwa zu dieser bestimmten Instincthandlung necessirt, 
sondern blosse pradisponirt.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 
3d. ed;, p.°79: 

3‘ Giebt es einen wirklichen Instinct, oder sind die sogenannten 
Instincthandlungen nur Resultate bewusster Ueberlegung ? ’’— 
‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3d ed., p. 79. 


106 Unconscious Memory 


alleged that the more limited is the range of the conscious 
mental activity of any living being, the more fully developed 
in proportion to its entire mental power is its performance 
commonly found to be in respect of its own limited and 
special instinctive department. This holds as good with 
the lower animals as with men, and is explained by the 
fact that perfection of proficiency is only partly dependent 
upon natural capacity, but is in great measure due to 
practice and cultivation of the original faculty. A philo- 
logist, for example, is unskilled in questions of juris- 
prudence ; a natural philosopher or mathematician, in 
philology ; an abstract philosopher, in poetical criticism. 
Nor has this anything to do with the natural talents of the 
several persons, but follows as a consequence of their 
special training. The more special, therefore, is the 
direction in which the mental activity of any living being 
is exercised, the more will the whole developing and 
practising power of the mind be brought to bear upon 
this one branch, so that it is not surprising if the special 
power comes ultimately to bear an increased proportion 
to the total power of the individual, through the contrac- 
tion of the range within which it is exercised. 

Those, however, who apply this to the elucidation of 
instinct should not forget the words, “in proportion to 
the entire mental power of the animal in question,” and 
should bear in mind that the entire mental power becomes 
less and less continually as we descend the scale of animal 
life, whereas proficiency in the performance of an in- 
stinctive action seems to be much of a muchness in all 
grades of the animal world. As, therefore, those per- 
formances which indisputably proceed from conscious 
deliberation decrease proportionately with decrease of 
mental power, while nothing of the kind is observable in 
the case of instinct—it follows that instinct must involve 
some other principle than that of conscious intelligence. 
We see, moreover, that actions which have their source 
in conscious intelligence are of one and the same kind, 


Translation from Von Hartmann 107 


whether among the lower animals or with mankind— 
that is to say, that they are acquired by apprenticeship 
or instruction and perfected by practice; so that the 
saying, ‘‘ Age brings wisdom,” holds good with the brutes 
as much as with ourselves. Instinctive actions, on the 
contrary, have a special and distinct character, in that 
they are performed with no less proficiency by animals 
that have been reared in solitude than by those that have 
been instructed by their parents, the first essays of a 
hitherto unpractised animal being as successful as its 
later ones. There is a difference in principle here which 
cannot be mistaken. Again, we know by experience that 
the feebler and more limited an intelligence is, the more 
slowly do ideas act upon it, that is to say, the slower and 
more laborious is its conscious thought. So long as in- 
stinct does not come into play, this holds good both in the 
case of men of different powers of comprehension and 
with animals; but with instinct all is changed, for it is 
the speciality of instinct never to hesitate or loiter, but 
to take action instantly upon perceiving that the stimu- 
lating motive has made its appearance. This rapidity in 
arriving at a resolution is common to the instinctive actions 
both of the highest and the lowest animals, and indicates 
an essential difference between instinct and conscious 
deliberation. 

Finally, as regards perfection of the power of execu- 
tion, a glance will suffice to show the disproportion that 
exists between this and the grade of intellectual activity 
on which an animal may be standing. Take, for instance, 
the caterpillar of the emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia 
minor). It eats the leaves of the bush upon which it was 
born: at the utmost has just enough sense to get on to 
the lower side of the leaves if it begins to rain, and from 
time to time changes its skin. This is its whole existence, 
which certainly does not lead us to expect a display of 
any, even the most limited, intellectual power. When, 
however, the time comes for the larva of this moth to 


108 Unconscious Memory 


become a chrysalis, it spins for itself a double cocoon, 
fortified with bristles that point outwards, so that it can 
be opened easily from within, though it is sufficiently im- 
penetrable from without. If this contrivance were the 
result of conscious reflection, we should have to suppose 
some such reasoning process as the following to take place 
in the mind of the caterpillar :— I am about to become 
a chrysalis, and, motionless as I must be, shall be exposed 
to many different kinds of attack. I must therefore weave 
myself a web. But when I am a moth I shall not be able, 
as some moths are, to find my way out of it by chemical 
or mechanical means; therefore I must leave a way 
open for myself. In order, however, that my enemies 
may not take advantage of this, I will close it with elastic 
bristles, which I can easily push asunder from within, 
but which, upon the principle of the arch, will resist all 
pressure from without.” Surely this is asking rather 
too much from a poor caterpillar ; yet the whole of the 
foregoing must be thought out if a correct result is to be 
arrived at. 

This theoretical separation of instinct from conscious 
intelligence can be easily misrepresented by opponents of 
my theory, as though a separation in practice also would 
be necessitated in consequence. This is by no means 
my intention. On the contrary, I have already insisted 
at some length that both the two kinds of mental activity 
may co-exist in all manner of different proportions, so that 
| there may be every degree of combination, from pure in- 
stinct to pure deliberation. We shall see, however, in a 
later chapter, that even in the highest and most abstract 
activity of human consciousness there are forces at work 
that are of the highest importance, and are essentially 
of the same kind as instinct. 

On the other hand, the most marvellous displays of 
instinct are to be found not only in plants, but also in 
those lowest organisms of the simplest bodily form which 
are partly unicellular, and in respect of conscious intelli- 


Translation from Von Hartmann 109 


gence stand far below the higher plants—to which, indeed, 
any kind of deliberative faculty is commonly denied. Even 
in the case of those minute microscopic organisms that 
baffle our attempts to classify them either as animals or 
vegetables, we are still compelled to admire an instinc- 
tive, purposive behaviour, which goes far beyond a mere 
reflex responsive to a stimulus from without; all doubt, 
therefore, concerning the actual existence of an instinct 
must be at an end, and the attempt to deduce it as a con- 
sequence of conscious deliberation be given up as hopeless. 
I will here adduce an instance as extraordinary as any 
we yet know of, showing, as it does, that many different 
purposes, which in the case of the higher animals require 
a complicated system of organs of motion, can be attained 
with incredibly simple means. 

Arcella vulgaris is a minute morsel of protoplasm, which 
lives in a concave-convex, brown, finely reticulated shell, 
through a circular opening in the concave side of which 
it can project itself by throwing out pseudopodia. Ii we 
look through a microscope at a drop of water containing 
living arcella, we may happen to see one of them lying 
on its back at the bottom of the drop, and making fruit- 
less efforts for two or three minutes to lay hold of some 
fixed point by means of a pseudopodium. After this there 
will appear suddenly from two to five, but sometimes 
more, dark points in the protoplasm at a small distance 
from the circumference, and, as a rule, at regular distances 
from one another. These rapidly develop themselves into 
well-defined spherical air vesicles, and come presently to 
fill a considerable part of the hollow of the shell, thereby 
driving part of the protoplasm outside it. After from 
five to twenty minutes, the specific eravity of the arcella 
ss so much lessened that it is lifted by the water with its 
pseudopodia, and brought up against the upper surface 
of the water-drop, on which it is able to travel. In from 
five to ten minutes the vesicles will now disappear, the 
last small point vanishing with a jerk. If, however, the 


IIO Unconscious Memory 


creature has been accidentally turned over during its 
journey, and reaches the top of the water-drop with its 
back uppermost, the vesicles will continue growing only 
on one side, while they diminish on the other; by this 
means the shell is brought first into an oblique and 
then into a vertical position, until one of the pseudopodia 
obtains a footing and the whole turns over. From the 
moment the animal has obtained foothold, the bladders 
become immediately smaller, and after they have dis- 
appeared the experiment may be repeated at pleasure. 
Ihe positions of the protoplasm which the vesicles 
fashion change continually ; only the grainless protoplasm 
of the pseudopodia develops no air. After long and fruitless 
efforts a manifest fatigue sets in; the animal gives up the 
attempt for a time, and resumes it after an interval of repose. 
Engelmann, the discoverer of these phenomena, says 
(Pfliiger’s Archiv fiir Physiologie, Bd. IT.) : ‘‘ The changes 
in volume in all the vesicles of the same animal are for the 
most part synchronous, effected in the same manner, and 
of like size. There are, however, not a few exceptions ; 
it often happens that some of them increase or diminish 
in volume much faster than others; sometimes one may 
increase while another diminishes ; all the changes, how- 
ever, are throughout unquestionably intentional. The 
object of the air-vesicles is to bring the animal into such 
a position that it can take fast hold of something with.its 
pseudopodia. When this has been obtained, the air dis- 
appears without our being able to discover any other 
reason for its disappearance than the fact that it is no 
longer needed. . . . If we bear these circumstances in 
mind, we can almost always tell whether an arcella will 
develop air-vesicles or no; and if it has already developed 
them, we can tell whether they will increase or diminish. 
- . . The arcelle, in fact, in this power of altering their 
specific gravity, possess a mechanism for raising themselves 
to the top of the water, or lowering themselves to the 
bottom at will. They use this not only in the abnormal 


Translation from Von Hartmann III 


circumstances of their being under microscopical observa- 
tion, but at all times, as may be known by our being 
always able to find some specimens with air-bladders at 
the top of the water in which they live.” 

If what has been already advanced has failed to con- 
vince the reader of the hopelessness of attempting to 
explain instinct as a mode of conscious deliberation, he 
must admit that the following considerations are con- 
clusive. It is most certain that deliberations and conscious 
reflection can only take account of such data as are con- 
sciously perceived ; if, then, it can be shown that data 
absolutely indispensable for the arrival at a just conclusion 
cannot by any possibility have been known consciously, 
the result can no longer be held as having had its source 
in conscious deliberation. It is admitted that the only 
way in which consciousness can arrive at a knowledge 
of exterior facts is by way of an impression made upon 
the senses. We must, therefore, prove that a knowledge 
of the facts indispensable for arrival at a just conclusion 
could not have been thus acquired. This may be done 
as follows:1 for, Firstly, the facts in question lie in the 


1 « Dieser Beweis ist dadurch zu fiihren ; erstens dass die betreffen- 
den Thatsachen in der Zukunft liegen, und dem Verstande die 
Anhaltepunkte feblen, um ihr zukinftiges Eintreten aus den gegen- 
wirtigen Verhaltnissen zu erschliessen ; zweitens, dass die be- 
treffenden Thatsachen augenscheinlich der sinnlichen Wahrneh- 
mung verschlossen liegen, weil nur die Erfahrung friiherer Falle 
iiber sie belehren kann, und diese laut der Beobachtung ausge- 
schlossen ist. Es wirde fiir unsere Interessen keinen Unterschied 
machen, wenn, was ich wahrscheinlich halte, bei fortschreitender 
physiologischer Erkenntniss alle jetzt fiir den ersten Fall anzu- 
fiihrenden Beispiele sich als solche des zweiten F alls ausweisen 
sollten, wie dies unleugbar bei vielen friiher gebrauchten Beispielen 
schon geschehen ist; denn ein apriorisches Wissen ohne jeden 
sinnlichen Anstoss ist wohl kaum wunderbarer zu nennen, als. 
ein Wissen, welches zwar bei Gelegenhett gewisser sinnlicher Wabhr- 
nehmung zu Tage tritt, aber mit diesen nur durch eine solche 
Kette von Schliissen und angewandten Kenntnissen in Verbindung 
stehend gedacht werden kénnte, dass deren Moéglichkeit bei dem 
Zustande der Fahigkeiten und Bildung der betreffenden Thiere 
entschieden geleugnet werden muss.’”’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Un- 
conscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 85. 


I12 Unconscious Memory 


future, and the present gives no ground for conjecturing 
the time and manner of their subsequent development. 

Secondly, they are manifestly debarred from the category 
of perceptions perceived through the senses, inasmuch as no 
information can be derived concerning them except through 
experience of similar occurrences in time past, and such 
experience is plainly out of the question. 

It would not affect the argument if, as I think likely, 
it were to turn out, with the advance of our physiological 
knowledge, that all the examples of the first case that I 
am about to adduce reduce themselves to examples of the 
second, as must be admitted to have already happened 
in respect of many that I have adduced hitherto. For it 
is hardly more difficult to conceive of @ priori knowledge, 
disconnected from any impression made upon the senses, 
than of knowledge which, it is true, does at the present 
day manifest itself upon the occasion of certain general 
perceptions, but which can only be supposed to be con- 
nected with these by means of such a chain of inferences 
and judiciously applied knowledge as cannot be believed 
to exist when we have regard to the capacity and organisa- 
tion of the animal we may be considering. 

An example of the first case is supplied by the larva 
of the stag-beetle in its endeavour to make itself a con- 
venient hole in which to become a chrysalis. The female 
larva digs a hole exactly her own size, but the male makes 
one as long again as himself, so as to allow for the growth 
of his horns, which will be about the same length as his 
body. A knowledge of this circumstance is indispensable 
if the result achieved is to be considered as due to reflec- 
tion, yet the actual present of the larva affords it no ground 
for conjecturing beforehand the condition in which it will 
presently find itself. 

As regards the second case, ferrets and buzzards fall 
forthwith upon blind worms or other non-poisonous snakes, 
and devour them then and there. But they exhibit the 
greatest caution in laying hold of adders, even though 


Translation from Von Hartmann 113 


they have never before seen one, and will endeavour first 
to bruise their heads, so as to avoid being bitten. As there 
is nothing in any other respect alarming in the adder, a 
conscious knowledge of the danger of its bite is indis- 
pensable, if the conduct above described is to be referred 
to conscious deliberation. But this could only have been 
acquired through experience, and the possibility of such 
experience may be controlled in the case of animals that 
have been kept in captivity from their youth up, so that 
the knowledge displayed can be ascertained to be in- 
dependent of experience. On the other hand, both the 
above illustrations afford evidence of an unconscious per- 
ception of the facts, and prove the existence of a direct 
knowledge underivable from any sensual impression or 
from consciousness. 

This has always been recognised,4 and has been de- 
scribed under the words “ presentiment ”’ or “‘ foreboding.”’ 
These words, however, refer, on the one hand, only to an 
unknowable in the future, separated from us by space, 
and not to one that is actually present; on the other 
hand, they denote only the faint, dull, indefinite echo 
returned by consciousness to an invariably distinct state 


1« Man hat dieselbe jederzeit anerkannt und mit den Worten 
Vorgefiihl oder Ahnung bezeichnet; indess beziehen sich diese 
Worter einerseits nur auf zukiinftiges, nicht auf gegenwartiges, 
raumlich getrenntes Unwahrnehmbares, anderseits bezeichnen sie 
nur die leise, dumpfe, unbestimmte Resonanz des Bewusstseins mit 
dem unfehlbar bestimmten Zustande der unbewussten Erkenntniss. 
Daher das Wort Vorgefithlin Riicksicht auf die Dumpfheit und Unbes- 
timmtheit, wahrend doch leicht zu sehen ist, dass das von allen, auch 
den unbewussten Vorstellungen entblésste Gefihl fiir das Resultat 
gar keinen Einfluss haben kann, sondern nur eine Vorstellung, weil 
dies allein Erkenntniss enthalt. Die in Bewusstsein mitklingende 
Ahnung kann allerdings unter Umstanden ziemlich deutlich sein, so 
dass sie sich beim Menschen in Gedanken und Wort fixiren lasst ; 
doch ist dies auch im Menschen erfahrungsmassig bei den eigen- 
thiimlichen Instincten nicht der Fall, vielmehr ist bei diesen die 
Resonanz der unbewussten Erkenntniss im Bewusstsein meistens 
so schwach, dass sie sich wirklich nur in begleitenden Gefithlen oder 
der Stimmung daussert, dass sie einen unendlich kleinen Bruchtheil 
des Gemeingefiihls bildet.’’—-‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 3d 
€d.; D2 00, 


I 


Ir4 Unconscious Memory 


of unconscious knowledge. Hence the word “ presenti- 
ment,’ which carries with it an idea of faintness and in- 
distinctness, while, however, it may be easily seen that 
sentiment destitute of all, even unconscious, ideas can 
have no influence upon the result, for knowledge can only 
follow upon an idea. A presentiment that sounds in con- 
sonance with our consciousness can indeed, under certain 
circumstances, become tolerably definite, so that in the case 
of man it can be expressed in thought and language ; 
but experience teaches us that even among ourselves this 
is not so when instincts special to the human race come 
into play ; we see rather that the echo of our unconscious 
knowledge which finds its way into our consciousness is so 
weak that it manifests itself only in the accompanying 
feelings or frame of mind, and represents but an infinitely 
small fraction of the sum of our sensations. It is obvious 
that such a faintly sympathetic consciousness cannot form 
a sufficient foundation for a superstructure of conscious 
deliberation; on the other hand, conscious deliberation 
would be unnecessary, inasmuch as the process of thinking 
must have been already gone through unconsciously, for © 
every faint presentiment that obtrudes itself upon our 
consciousness is in fact only the consequence of a distinct 
unconscious knowledge, and the knowledge with which it 
is concerned is almost always an idea of the purpose of 
some instinctive action, or of one most intimately con- 
nected therewith. Thus, in the case of the stag-beetle, 
the purpose consists in the leaving space for the growth 
of the horns; the means, in the digging the hole of a 
sufficient size; and the unconscious knowledge, in pre- 
science concerning the future development of the horns. 
Lastly, all instinctive actions give us an impression of 
absolute security and infallibility. With instinct the will 
is never hesitating or weak, as it is when inferences are 
being drawn consciously. We never find instinct making 
mistakes ; we cannot, therefore, ascribe a result which is 
so invariably precise to such an obscure condition of mind 


Translation from Von Hartmann 115 


as is implied when the word presentiment is used ; on the 
contrary, this absolute certainty is so characteristic a 
feature of instinctive actions, that it constitutes almost 
the only well-marked point of distinction between these 
and actions that are done upon reflection. But from this 
it must again follow that some principle lies at the root of 
instinct other than that which underlies reflective action, 
and this can only be looked for in a determination of the 
will through a process that lies in the unconscious, to 
which this character of unhesitating infallibility will attach 
itself in all our future investigations. 

Many will be surprised at my ascribing to instinct an 
unconscious knowledge, arising out of no sensual impression, 
and yet invariably accurate. This, however, is not a con- 
sequence of my theory concerning instinct; it is the 
foundation on which that theory is based, and is forced 
upon us by facts. I must therefore adduce examples. And 
to give a name to the unconscious knowledge, which is 
not acquired through impression made upon the senses, 
but which will be found to be in our possession, though 
attained without the instrumentality of means,” I prefer 
the word “ clairvoyance ”’ 3 to “ presentiment,’’ which, for 
reasons already given, will not serve me. This word, 
therefore, will be here employed throughout, as above 
defined. 

Let us now consider examples of the instincts of self- 
preservation, subsistence, migration, and the continuation 
of the species. Most animals know their natural enemies 
prior to experience of any hostile designs upon themselves. 
A flight of young pigeons, even though they have no old 
birds with them, will become shy, and will separate from 
one another on the approach of a bird of prey. Horses 


1“ Tn der Bestimmung des Willens durch einen im Unbewussten 
liegenden Process ... fir welchen sich dieser Character der 
zweifellosen Selbstgewissheit in allen folgenden Untersuchungen 
bewahren wird.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,”’ p. 87. 

2“*Sondern als unmittelbarer Besitz vorgefunden wird.’’— 
‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 87. 3“ Hellsehen.” 


116 Unconscious Memory 


and cattle that come from countries where there are no 
lions become unquiet and display alarm as soon as they 
are aware that a lion is approaching them in the night. 
Horses going along a bridle-path that used to leave the 
town at the back of the old dens of the carnivora in the 
Berlin Zoological Gardens were often terrified by the 
propinquity of enemies who were entirely unknown to 
them. Sticklebacks will swim composedly among a number 
of voracious pike, knowing, as they do, that the pike will 
not touch them. For if a pike once by mistake swallows 
a stickleback, the stickleback will stick in its throat by 
reason of the spine it carries upon its back, and the pike 
must starve to death without being able to transmit his 
painful experience to his descendants. In some countries 
there are people who by choice eat dog’s flesh ; dogs are 
invariably savage in the presence of these persons, as 
recognising in them enemies at whose hands they may 
one day come to harm. This is the more wonderful inas- 
much as dog’s fat applied externally (as when rubbed 
upon boots) attracts dogs by its smell. Grant saw a young 
chimpanzee throw itself into convulsions of terror at the © 
sight of a large snake; and even among ourselves a 
Gretchen can often detect a Mephistopheles. An insect 
of the genius bombyx will seize another of the genus 
parnopea, and kill it wherever it finds it, without making 
any subsequent use of the body ; but we know that the 
last-named insect lies in wait for the eggs of the first, and 
is therefore the natural enemy ofits race. The phenomenon 
known to stockdrivers and shepherds as “‘ das Biesen des 
Viehes ”’ affords another example. For when a “ dassel ”’ 
or “‘bies”’ fly draws near the herd, the cattle become 
unmanageable and run about among one another as though 
they were mad, knowing, as they do, that the larve from 
the eggs which the fly will lay upon them will presently 
pierce their hides and occasion them painful sores. These 
“dassel’’ flies—which have no sting—closely resemble 
another kind of gadfly which has a sting. Nevertheless, 


Translation from Von Hartmann 117 


this last kind is little feared by cattle, while the first is so 
to an inordinate extent. The laying of the eggs upon the 
skin is at the time quite painless, and no ill consequences 
follow until long afterwards, so that we cannot suppose 
the cattle to draw a conscious inference concerning the 
connection that exists between the two. I have already 
spoken of the foresight shown by ferrets and buzzards in 
respect of adders ; in like manner a young honey-buzzard, 
on being shown a wasp for the first time, immediately 
devoured it after having squeezed the sting from its body. 

No animal, whose instinct has not been vitiated by un- 
natural habits, will eat poisonous plants. Even when 
apes have contracted bad habits through their having 
been brought into contact with mankind, they can still 
be trusted to show us whether certain fruits found in their 
native forests are poisonous or no ; for if poisonous fruits 
are offered them they will refuse them with loud cries. 
Every animal will choose for its sustenance exactly those 
animal or vegetable substances which agree best with 
its digestive organs, without having received any instruc- 
tion on the matter, and without testing them before- 
hand. Even, indeed, though we assume that the power 
of distinguishing the different kinds of food is due to 
sight and not to smell, it remains none the less mysterious 
how the animal can know what it is that will agree with 
it. Thus the kid which Galen took prematurely from its 
mother smelt at all the different kinds of food that were 
set before it, but drank only the milk without touching 
anything else. The cherry-finch opens a cherry-stone by 
turning it so that her beak can hit the part where the 
two sides join, and does this as much with the first stone 
she cracks as with the last. Fitchets, martens, and weasels 
make small holes on the opposite sides of an egg which 
they are about to suck, so that the air may come in while 
they are sucking. Not only do animals know the food 
that will suit them best, but they find out the most suit- 
able remedies when they are ill, and constantly form a 


118 Unconscious Memory 


correct diagnosis of their malady with a therapeutical 
knowledge which they cannot possibly have acquired. 
Dogs will often eat a great quantity of grass—particularly 
couch-grass—when they are unwell, especially after spring, 
if they have worms, which thus pass from them entangled 
in the grass, or if they want to get fragments of bone 
from out of their stomachs. As a purgative they make use 
of plants that sting. Hens and pigeons pick lime from 
walls and pavements if their food does not afford them 
lime enough to make their eggshells with. Little children 
eat chalk when suffering from acidity of the stomach, 
and pieces of charcoal if they are troubled with flatulence. 
We may observe these same instincts for certain kinds 
of food or drugs even among grown-up people, under 
circumstances in which their unconscious nature has un- 
usual power; as, for example, among women when they 
are pregnant, whose capricious appetites are probably 
due to some special condition of the foetus, which renders 
a certain state of the blood desirable. Field-mice bite 
off the germs of the corn which they collect together, 
in order to prevent its growing during the winter. Some 
days before the beginning of cold weather the squirrel is 
most assiduous in augmenting its store, and then closes 
its dwelling. Birds of passage betake themselves to 
warmer countries at times when there is still no scarcity 
of food for them here, and when the temperature is con- 
siderably warmer than it will be when they return to us. 
The same holds good of the time when animals begin to 
prepare their winter quarters, which beetles constantly 
do during the very hottest days of autumn. When swallows 
and storks find their way back to their native places over 
distances of hundreds of miles, and though the aspect of 
the country is reversed, we say that this is due to the 
acuteness of their perception of locality; but the same 
cannot be said of dogs, which, though they have been 
carried in a bag from one place to another that they do 
not know, and have been turned round and round twenty 


Translation from Von Hartmann 119 


times over, have still been known to find their way home. 
Here we can say no more than that their instinct has con- 
ducted them—that the clairvoyance of the unconscious 
has allowed them to conjecture their way.* 

Before an early winter, birds of passage collect them- 
selves in preparation for their flight sooner than usual ; 
but when the winter is going to be mild, they will either 
not migrate at all, or travel only a small distance south- 
ward. When a hard winter is coming, tortoises will make 
their burrows deeper. If wild geese, cranes, etc., soon 
return from the countries to which they had betaken them- 
selves at the beginning of spring, it is a sign that a hot 
and dry summer is about to ensue in those countries, 
and that the drought will prevent their being able to rear 
their young. In years of flood, beavers construct their 
dwellings at a higher level than usual, and shortly before 
an inundation the field-mice in Kamtschatka come out of 
their holes in large bands. If the summer is going to be 
dry, spiders may be seen in May and April, hanging from 
the ends of threads several feet in length. If in winter 
spiders are seen running about much, fighting with one 
another and preparing new webs, there will be cold weather 
within the next nine days, or from that to twelve: when 
they again hide themselves there will bea thaw. I have 
no doubt that much of this power of prophesying the 
weather is due to a perception of certain atmospheric 
conditions which escape ourselves, but this perception can 
only have relation to a certain actual and now present 
condition of the weather; and what can the impression 
made by this have to do with their idea of the weather 
that will ensue? No one will ascribe to animals a power 
of prognosticating the weather months beforehand by 
means of inferences drawn logically from a series of ob- 
servations,2 to the extent of being able to foretell floods. 


1‘ Das Hellsehen des Unbewussten hat sie den rechten Weg 
ahnen lassen.” —‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,’ p. 90, 3ded., 1871. 
2“ Man wird doch wahrlich nicht den Thieren zumuthen wollen, 
durch meteorologische Schliisse das Wetter auf Monate im Voraus zu 


120 Unconscious Memory 


It is far more probable that the power of perceiving subtle 
differences of actual atmospheric condition is nothing 
more than the sensual perception which acts as motive— 
for a motive must assuredly be always present—when an 
instinct comes into operation. It continues to hold good, 
therefore, that the power of foreseeing the weather is a 
case of unconscious clairvoyance, of which the stork which 
takes its departure for the south four weeks earlier than 
usual knows no more than does the stag when before a 
cold winter he grows himself a thicker pelt than is his wont. 

On the one hand, animals have present in their con- 
sciousness a perception of the actual state of the weather ; 
on the other, their ensuing action is precisely such as 
it would be if the idea present with them was that of the 
weather that is about to come. This they cannot con- 
sciously have; the only natural intermediate link, there- 
fore, between their conscious knowledge and their action 
is supplied by unconscious idea, which, however, is always 
accurately prescient, inasmuch as it contains something 
which is neither given directly to the animal through 
sensual perception, nor can be deduced inferentially 
through the understanding. 

Most wonderful of all are the instincts connected with 


berechnen, ja sogar Ueberschwemmungen vorauszusehen. Vielmehr 
ist eine solche Gefithlswahrnehmung gegenwartiger atmospharischer 
Einfltisse nichts weiter als die sinnliche Wahrnehmung, welche als 
Motiv wirkt, und ein Motiv muss ja doch immer vorhanden sein, 
wenn ein Instinct functioniren soll. Es bleibt also trotzdem bestehen, 
dass das Voraussehen der Witterung ein unbewusstes Hellsehen ist, 
von dem der Storch, der vier Wochen friiher nach Siiden aufbricht, 
so wenig etwas weiss, als der Hirsch, der sich vor einem kalten 
Winter einen dickeren Pelz als gewdhnlich wachsen lasst. Die 
Thiere haben eben einerseits das gegenwartige Witterungsgefiihl im 
Bewusstsein, daraus folgt andererseits ihr Handeln gerade so, als 
ob sie die Vorstellung der zukiinftigen Witterung hatten; im 
Bewusstsein haben sie dieselbe aber nicht, also bietet sich als einzig 
natirliches Mittelglied die unbewusste Vorstellung, die nun aber 
immer ein Hellsehen ist, weil sie etwas enthalt, was dem Thier 
weder durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung direct gegeben ist, noch durch 
seine Verstandesmittel aus der Wahrnehmung geschlossen werden 
kann.’’—“‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 91, 3d ed., 1871. 


Translation from Von Hartmann 121 


the continuation of the species. The males always find 
out the females of their own kind, but certainly not solely 
through their resemblance to themselves. With many 
animals, as, for example, parasitic crabs, the sexes so 
little resemble one another that the male would be more 
likely to seek a mate from the females of a thousand other 
species than from his own. Certain butterflies are poly- 
morphic, and not only do the males and females of the 
same species differ, but the females present two distinct 
forms, one of which as a general rule mimics the outward 
appearance of a distant but highly valued species ; yet 
the males will pair only with the females of their own 
kind, and not with the strangers, though these may be 
very likely much more like the males themselves. Among 
the insect species of the strepsiptera, the female is a shape- 
less worm which lives its whole life long in the hind body 
of a wasp; its head, which is of the shape of a lentil, pro- 
trudes between two of the belly rings of the wasp, the 
rest of the body being inside. The male, which only 
lives for a few hours, and resembles a moth, nevertheless 
recognises his mate in spite of these adverse circumstances, 
and fecundates her. 

Before any experience of parturition, the knowledge 
that it is approaching drives all mammals into solitude, 
and bids them prepare a nest for their young in a hole or 
in some other place of shelter. The bird builds her nest 
as soon as she feels the eggs coming to maturity within 
her. Snails, land-crabs, tree-frogs, and toads, all of them 
ordinarily dwellers upon land, now betake themselves to 
the water; sea-tortoises go on shore, and many salt- 
water fishes come up into the rivers in order to lay their 
eggs where they can alone find the requisities for their 
development. Insects lay their eggs in the most varied 
kinds of situations,—in sand, on leaves, under the hides 
and horny substances of other animals: they often select 
the spot where the larva will be able most readily to find 
its future sustenance, as in autumn upon the trees that 


1212 Unconscious Memory 


will open first in the coming spring, or in spring upon the 
blossoms that will first bear fruit in autumn, or in the 
insides of those caterpillars which will soonest as chrysalides 
provide the parasitic larva at once with food and with 
protection. Other insects select the sites from which they 
will first get forwarded to the destination best adapted 
for their development. Thus some horseflies lay their eggs 
upon the lips of horses or upon parts where they are 
accustomed to lick themselves. The eggs get conveyed 
hence into the entrails, the proper place for their develop- 
ment,—and are excreted upon their arrival at maturity. 
The flies that infest cattle know so well how to select 
the most vigorous and healthiest beasts, that cattle- 
dealers and tanners place entire dependence upon them, 
and prefer those beasts and hides that are most scarred 
by maggots. This selection of the best cattle by the help 
of these flies is no evidence in support of the conclusion 
that the flies possess the power of making experiments 
consciously and of reflecting thereupon, even though the 
men whose trade it is to do this recognise them as their 
masters. The solitary wasp makes a hole several inches 
deep in the sand, lays her egg, and packs along with it a 
number of green maggots that have no legs, and which, 
being on the point of becoming chrysalides, are well 
nourished and able to go a long time without food; she 
packs these maggots so closely together that they cannot 
move nor turn into chrysalides, and just enough of them 
to support the larva until it becomes a chrysalis. A kind 
of bug (cerceris bupresticida), which itself only lives upon 
pollen, lays her eggs in an underground cell, and with 
each one of them she deposits three beetles, which she 
has lain in wait for and captured when they were still 
weak through having only just left off being chrysalides. 
She kills these beetles, and appears to smear them with 
a fluid whereby she preserves them fresh and suitable for 
food. Many kinds of wasps open the cells in which their 
larve are confined when these must have consumed the 


Translation from Von Hartmann 123 


provision that was left with them. They supply them 
with more food, and again close the cell. Ants, again, hit 
always upon exactly the right moment for opening the 
cocoons in which their larve are confined and for setting 
them free, the larva being unable to do this for itself. 
Yet the life of only a few kinds of insects lasts longer than 
a single breeding season. What then can they know 
about the contents of their eggs and the fittest place for 
their development ? What can they know about the 
kind of food the larva will want when it leaves the egg— 
a food so different from their own? What, again, can 
they know about the quantity of food that will be necessary? 
How much of all this at least can they know consciously ? 
Yet their actions, the pains they take, and the importance 
they evidently attach to these matters, prove that they 
have a foreknowledge of the future: this knowledge 
therefore can only be an unconscious clairvoyance. For 
clairvoyance it must certainly be that inspires the will 
of an animal to open cells and cocoons at the very moment 
that the larva is either ready for more food or fit for 
leaving the cocoon. The eggs of the cuckoo do not take 
only from two to three days to mature in her ovaries, as 
those of most birds do, but require from eleven to twelve ; 
the cuckoo, therefore, cannot sit upon her own eggs, 
for her first egg would be spoiled before the last was laid. 
She therefore lays in other birds’ nests—of course laying 
each egg in a different nest. But in order that the birds 
may not perceive her egg to be a stranger and turn it 
out of the nest, not only does she lay an egg much smaller 
than might be expected from a bird of her size (for she only 
finds her opportunity among small birds), but, as already 
said, she imitates the other eggs in the nest she has 
selected with surprising accuracy in respect both of 
colour and marking. As the cuckoo chooses the nest 
some days beforehand, it may be thought, if the nest is 
an open one, that the cuckoo looks upon the colour of 
the eggs within it while her own is in process of maturing 


124 Unconscious Memory 


inside her, and that it is thus her egg comes to assume 
the colour of the others; but this explanation will not 
hold good for nests that are made in the holes of trees, as 
that of sylvia phenicurus, or which are oven-shaped with 
a narrow entrance, as with sylvia rufa. In these cases 
the cuckoo can neither slip in nor look in, and must there- 
fore lay her egg outside the nest and push it inside with 
her beak ; she can therefore have no means of perceiving 
through her senses what the eggs already in the nest are 
like. If, then, in spite of all this, her egg closely resembles 
the others, this can only have come about through an un- 
conscious clairvoyance which directs the process that goes 
on within the ovary in respect of colour and marking. 

An important argument in support of the existence of 
a clairvoyance in the instincts of animals is to be found 
in the series of facts which testify to the existence of a 
like clairvoyance, under certain circumstances, even among 
human beings, while the self-curative instincts of children 
and of pregnant women have been already mentioned. 
Here, however,' in correspondence with the higher stage 
of development which human consciousness has attained, 
a stronger echo of the unconscious clairvoyance commonly 
resounds within consciousness itself, and this is represented 
by a more or less definite presentiment of the consequences 
that will ensue. It is also in accord with the greater in- 
dependence of the human intellect that this kind of pre- 
sentiment is not felt exclusively immediately before the 


* “ Meistentheils tritt aber hier der hGheren Bewusstseinstufe der 
Menschen entsprechend eine starkere Resonanz des Bewusstseins 
mit dem bewussten Hellsehen hervor, die sich also mehr oder 
minder deutliche Ahnung darstellt. Ausserdem entspricht es der 
grosseren Selbststandigkeit des menschlichen Intellects, dass diese 
Ahnung nicht ausschliesslich Behufs der unmittelbaren Ausfuhrung 
einer Handlung eintritt, sondern bisweilen auch unabhangig von 
der Bedingung einer momentan zu leistenden That als blosse 
Vorstellung ohne bewussten Willen sich zeigte, wenn nur die 
Bedingung erfiillt ist, dass der Gegenstand dieses Ahnens den Willen 
des Ahnenden im Allgemeinen in hohem Grade interessirt.’’— 
“ Philosophy of the Unconscious,’’ 3d ed., p. 94. 


Translation from Von Hartmann 125 


carrying out of an action, but is occasionally disconnected 
from the condition that an action has to be performed 
immediately, and displays itself simply as an idea in- 
dependently of conscious will, provided only that the matter 
concerning which the presentiment is felt is one which in 
a high degree concerns the will of the person who feels 
it. In the intervals of an intermittent fever or of other 
illness, it not unfrequently happens that sick persons can 
accurately foretell the day of an approaching attack and 
how long it will last. The same thing occurs almost 
invariably in the case of spontaneous, and generally in 
that of artificial, somnambulism ; certainly the Pythia, 
as is well known, used to announce the date of her next 
ecstatic state. In like manner the curative instinct dis- 
plays itself in somnambulists, and they have been known 
to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for 
the success attending their employment than for the com- 
pleteness with which they have run counter to received 
professional opinion. The indication of medicinal remedies 
is the only use which respectable electro-biologists will 
make of the half-sleeping, half-waking condition of those 
whom they are influencing. “People in perfectly sound 
health have been known, before childbirth or at the com- 
mencement of an illness, to predict accurately their own 
approaching death. The accomplishment of their pre- 
dictions can hardly be explained as the result of mere 
chance, for if this were all, the prophecy should fail at 
least as often as not, whereas the reverse is actually the 
case. Many of these persons neither desire death nor 
fear it, so that the result cannot be ascribed to imagina- 
tion.” So writes the celebrated physiologist, Burdach, 
from whose chapter on presentiment in his work “ Blicke 
in’s Leben” a great part of my most striking examples 
is taken. This presentiment of death, which is the excep- 
tion among men, is quite common with animals, even 
though they do not know nor understand what death is. 
When they become aware that their end is approaching, 


126 Unconscious Memory 


they steal away to outlying and solitary places. This is 
why in cities we so rarely see the dead body or skeleton of 
a cat. We can only suppose that the unconscious clair- 
voyance, which is of essentially the same kind whether 
in man or beast, calls forth presentiments of different 
degrees of definiteness, so that the cat is driven to with- 
draw herself through a mere instinct without knowing 
why she does so, while in man a definite perception is 
awakened of the fact that he is about to die. Not only 
do people have presentiments concerning their own death, 
but there are many instances on record in which they 
have become aware of that of those near and dear to 
them, the dying person having appeared in a dream to 
friend or wife or husband. Stories to this effect prevail 
among all nations, and unquestionably contain much 
truth. Closely connected with this is the power of second 
sight, which existed formerly in Scotland, and still does 
so in the Danish islands. This power enables certain people 
without any ecstasy, but simply through their keener per- 
ception, to foresee coming events, or to tell what is going 
on in foreign countries on matters in which they are 
deeply interested, such as deaths, battles, conflagrations 
(Swedenborg foretold the burning of Stockholm), the 
arrival or the doings of friends who are at a distance. 
With many persons this clairvoyance is confined to a 
knowledge of the death of their acquaintances or fellow- 
townspeople. There have been a great many instances 
of such death-prophetesses, and, what is most important, 
some cases have been verified in courts of law. I may 
say, in passing, that this power of second sight is found 
in persons who are in ecstatic states, in the spontaneous 
or artificially induced somnambulism of the higher kinds 
of waking dreams, as well as in lucid moments before death. 
These prophetic glimpses, by which the clairvoyance of the 
unconscious reveals itself to consciousness,! are commonly 


1“ Haufig sind die Ahnungen, in denen das Hellsehen des 
Unbewussten sich dem Bewusstsein offenbart, dunkel, unverstand- 


Translation from Von Hartmann 127 


obscure because in the brain they must assume a form 
perceptible by the senses, whereas the unconscious idea 
can have nothing to do with any form of sensual impression : 
it is for this reason that humours, dreams, and the halluci- 
nations of sick persons can so easily have a false significa- 
tion attached to them. The chances of error and self- 
deception that arise from this source, the ease with which 
people may be deceived intentionally, and the mischief 
which, as a general rule, attends a knowledge of the future, 
these considerations place beyond all doubt the prac- 
tical unwisdom of attempts to arrive at certainty con- 
cerning the future. This, however, cannot affect the 
weight which in theory should be attached to phenomena 
of this kind, and must not prevent us from recognising 
the positive existence of the clairvoyance whose existence 
I am maintaining, though it is often hidden under a chaos 
of madness and imposture. 

The materialistic and rationalistic tendencies of the 
present day lead most people either to deny facts of this 
kind in toto, or to ignore them, inasmuch as they are in- 
explicable from a materialistic standpoint, and cannot be 
established by the inductive or experimental method— 
as though this last were not equally impossible in the 
case of morals, social science, and politics. A mind of 
any candour will only be able to deny the truth of this 
entire class of phenomena so long as it remains in ignor- 
ance of the facts that have been related concerning them ; 
but, again, a continuance in this ignorance can only arise 
from unwillingness to be convinced. I am satisfied that 
many of those who deny all human power of divination 
would come to another, and, to say the least, more cautious 
conclusion if they would be at the pains of further in- 
vestigation ; and I hold that no one, even at the present 


lich und symbolisch, weil sie im Gehirn sinnliche Form annehmen 
miissen, wahrend die unbewusste Vorstellung an der Form der 
Sinnlichkeit kein Theil haben kann.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Uncon- 
scious,’”’ 3d ed., p. 96. 


128 Unconscious Memory 


day, need be ashamed of joining in with an opinion which 
was maintained by all the great spirits of antiquity except 
Epicurus—an opinion whose possible truth hardly one of 
our best modern philosophers has ventured to contravene, 
and which the champions of German enlightenment were 
so little disposed to relegate to the domain of old wives’ 
tales, that Goethe furnishes us with an example of second 
sight that fell within his own experience, and confirms it 
down to its minutest details. 

Although I am far from believing that the kind of 
phenomena above referred to form in themselves a proper 
foundation for a superstructure of scientific demonstration, 
I nevertheless find them valuable as a completion and 
further confirmation of the series of phenomena presented 
to us by the clairvoyance which we observe in human 
and animal instinct. Even though they only continue 
this series! through the echo that is awakened within 
our consciousness, they as powerfully support the account 
which instinctive actions give concerning their own nature 
as they are themselves supported by the analogy they 
present to the clairvoyance observable in instinct. This, 
then, as well as my desire not to lose an opportunity of 
protesting against a modern prejudice, must stand as my 
reason for having allowed myself to refer, in a scientific 
work, to a class of phenomena which has fallen at present 
into so much discredit. 

I will conclude with a few words upon a special kind of 
instinct which has a very instructive bearing upon the 
subject generally, and shows how impossible it is to evade 
the supposition of an unconscious clairvoyance on the 
part of instinct. In the examples adduced hitherto, the 
action of each individual has been done on the individual’s 
own behalf, except in the case of instincts connected with 


1<«Ebenso weil es diese Reihe nur in gesteigerter Bewusstsein- 
resonanz fortsetzt, stiitzt es jene Aussagen der Instincthandlungen 
iiber ihr eigenes Wesen ebenso sehr,’’&c.—‘‘ Philosophy of the Un- 
conscious,’”’ 3d ed., 97. 


Translation from Von Hartmann 129 


the continuation of the species, where the action benefits 
others—that is to say, the offspring of the creature per- 
forming it. 

We must now examine the cases in which a solidarity of 
instinct is found to exist between several individuals, so 
that, on the one hand, the action of each redounds to the 
common welfare, and, on the other, it becomes possible 
for a useful purpose to be achieved through the harmonious 
association of individual workers. This community of 
instinct exists also among the higher animals, but here 
it is harder to distinguish from associations originating 
through conscious will, inasmuch as speech supplies the 
means of a more perfect intercommunication of aim and 
plan. We shall, however, definitely recognise’ this general 
effect of a universal instinct in the origin of speech and 
in the great political and social movements in the history 
of the world. Here we are concerned only with the sim- 
plest and most definite examples that can be found any- 
where, and therefore we will deal in preference with the 
lower animals, among which, in the absence of voice, the 
means of communicating thought, mimicry, and physiog- 
nomy, are so imperfect that the harmony and interconnec- 
tion of the individual actions cannot in its main points be 
ascribed to an understanding arrived at through speech. 
Huber observed that when a new comb was being con- 
structed a number of the largest working bees, that were 
full of honey, took no part in the ordinary business of the 
others, but remained perfectly aloof. Twenty-four hours 


1‘ Wir werden trotzdem diese gemeinsame Wirkung eines 
Masseninstincts in der Entstehung der Sprache und den grossen 
politischen und socialen Bewegungen in der Weltgeschichte 
deutlich wieder erkennen; hier handelt es sich um médglichst 
einfache und deutliche Beispiele, und darum greifen wir zu 
niederen Thieren, wo die Mittel der Gedankenmittheilung bei 
fehlender Stimme, Mimik und Physiognomie so unvollkommen 
sind, dass die Uebereinstimmung und das Ineinandergreifen der 
einzelnen Leistungen in den Hauptsachen unmdglich der bewussten 
Verstandigung durch Sprache zugeschrieben werden darf.”"— 
‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 98. 


K 


130 Unconscious Memory 


afterwards small plates of wax had formed under their 
bellies. The bee drew these off with her hind-feet, masti- 
cated them, and made them into a band. The small plates 
of wax thus prepared were then glued to the roof of the 
hive one on the top of the other. When one of the bees 
of this kind had used up her plates of wax, another fol- 
lowed her and carried the same work forward in the same 
way. A thin rough vertical wall, half a line in thickness 
and fastened to the sides of the hive, was thus constructed. 
On this, one of the smaller working-bees whose belly was 
empty came, and after surveying the wall, made a flat 
half-oval excavation in the middle of one of its sides ; she 
piled up the wax thus excavated round the edge of the 
excavation. After a short time she was relieved by another 
like herself, till more than twenty followed one another in 
this way. Meanwhile another bee began to make a similar 
hollow on the other side of the wall, but corresponding 
only with the rim of the excavation on this side. Per- 
sently another bee began a second hollow upon the same 
side, each bee being continually relieved by others. Other 
bees kept coming up and bringing under their bellies 
plates of wax, with which they heightened the edge of the 
small wall of wax. In this, new bees were constantly ex- 
cavating the ground for more cells, while others proceeded 
by degrees to bring those already begun into a perfectly 
symmetrical shape, and at the same time continued build- 
ing up the prismatic walls between them. Thus the bees 
worked on opposite sides of the wall of wax, always on 
the same plan and in the closest correspondence with 
those upon the other side, until eventually the cells on 
both sides were completed in all their wonderful regularity 
and harmony of arrangement, not merely as regards those 
standing side by side, but also as regards those which were 
upon the other side of their pyramidal base. 

ls Let the reader consider how animals that are accustomed 
to confer together, by speech or otherwise, concerning de- 
signs which they may be pursuing in common, will wrangle 


Translation from Von Hartmann 131 


with thousand-fold diversity of opinion; let him reflect 
how often something has to be undone, destroyed, and 
done over again ; how at one time too many hands come 
forward, and at another too few; what running to and 
fro there is before each has found his right place; how 
often too many, and again too few, present themselves 
for a relief gang; and how we find all this in the con- 
certed works of men, who stand so far higher than bees in 
the scale of organisation. We see nothing of the kind 
among bees. A survey of their operations leaves rather 
the impression upon us as though an invisible master- 
builder had prearranged a scheme of action for the entire 
community, and had impressed it upon each individual 
member, as though each class of workers had learnt their 
appointed work by heart, knew their places and the 
numbers in which they should relieve each other, and 
were informed instantaneously by a secret signal of the 
moment when their action was wanted. This, however, 
is exactly the manner in which an instinct works; and 
as the intention of the entire community is instinctively 
present in the unconscious clairvoyance? of each indi- 
vidual bee, so the possession of this common instinct 
impels each one of them to the discharge of her special 
duties when the right moment has arrived. It is only 
thus that the wonderful tranquillity and order which we 
observe could be attained. What we are to think concern- 
ing this common instinct must be reserved for explanation 
later on, but the possibility of its existence is already 
evident, inasmuch? as each individual has an unconscious 
insight concerning the plan proposed to itself by the 
community, and also concerning the means immediately 


1‘“* Und wie durch Instinct der Plan des ganzen Stocks in un- 
bewusstem Hellsehen jeder einzelnen Biene einwohnt.’’ — “ Phil- 
osophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 99. 

2“ Tndem jedes Individuum den Plan des Ganzen und Sammt- 
liche gegenwartig zu ergreifende Mittel im unbewussten Hellsehen 
hat, wovon aber nur das Eine, was ihm zu thun obliegt, in sein 
Bewusstsein fallt.’>—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 99, 


132 Unconscious Memory 


to be adopted through concerted action—of which, how- 
ever; only the part requiring his own co-operation is pre- 
sent in the consciousness of each. Thus, for example, the 
larva of the bee itself spins the silky chamber in which it 
is to become a chrysalis, but other bees must close it with 
its lid of wax. The purpose of there being a chamber in 
which the larva can become a chrysalis must be present 
in the minds of each of these two parties to the transaction, 
but neither of them acts under the influence of conscious 
will, except in regard to his own particular department. 
I have already mentioned the fact that the larva, after its 
metamorphosis, must be freed from its cell by other bees, 
and have told how the working-bees in autumn kill the 
drones, so that they may not have to feed a number of 
useless mouths throughout the winter, and how they only 
spare them when they are wanted in order to fecundate a 
new queen. Furthermore, the working bees build cells in 
which the eggs laid by the queen may come to maturity, 
and, as a general rule, make just as many chambers as 
the queen lays eggs; they make these, moreover, in the 
same order as that in which the queen lays her eggs, 
namely, first for the working-bees, then for the drones, 
and lastly for the queens. In the polity of the bees, the 
working and the sexual capacities, which were once united, 
are now personified in three distinct kinds of individual, 
and these combine with an inner, unconscious, spiritual 
union, so as to form a single body politic, as the organs of 
a living body combine to form the body itself. 

In this chapter, therefore, we have arrived at the fol- 
lowing conclusions :— 

Instinct is not the result of conscious deliberation ;* 


1 Der Instinct ist nicht Resultat bewusster Ueberlegung, nicht 
Folge der kérperlichen Organisation, nicht blosses Resultat eines in 
der Organisation des Gehirns gelegenen Mechanismus, nicht Wirkung 
eines dem Geiste von aussen angeklebten todtem, seinen innersten 
Wesen fremden Mechanismus, sondern selbsteigene Leistung des 
Individuum aus seinem innersten Wesen und Character ent- 
springend.’’—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 100. 


Translation from Von Hartmann 133 


it is not a consequence of bodily organisation ; it is not 
a mere result of a mechanism which lies in the organisa- 
tion of the brain; it is not the operation of dead 
mechanism, glued on, as it were, to the soul, and foreign 
to its inmost essence ; but it is the spontaneous action of 
the individual, springing from his most essential nature 
and character. The purpose to which any particular kind 
of instinctive action is subservient is not the purpose of a 
soul standing outside the individual and near akin to 
Providence—a purpose once for all thought out, and now 
become a matter of necessity to the individual, so that he 
can act in no other way, though it is engrafted into his 
nature from without, and not natural to it. The purpose 
of the instinct is in each individual case thought out and 
willed unconsciously by the individual, and afterwards 
the choice of means adapted to each particular case is 
arrived at unconsciously. A knowledge of the purpose is 
often absolutely unattainable! by conscious knowledge 
through sensual perception. Then does the peculiarity 
of the unconscious display itself in the clairvoyance of 
which consciousness perceives partly only a faint and dull, 
and partly, as in the case of man, a more or less definite 
echo by way of sentiment, whereas the instinctive action 
itself—the carrying out of the means necessary for the 
achievement of the unconscious purpose—falls always 
more clearly within consciousness, inasmuch as due per- 
formance of what is necessary would be otherwise im- 
possible. Finally, the clairvoyance makes itself perceived 
in the concerted action of several individuals combining 
to carry out a common but unconscious purpose. 

Up to this point we have encountered clairvoyance as a 


1‘ Haufig ist die Kenntniss des Zwecks der bewussten Er- 
kenntniss durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung gar nicht zuganglich ; 
dann documentirt sich die Eigenthiimlichkeit des Unbewussten 
im Hellsehen, von welchem das Bewusstsein theils nur eine ver- 
schwindend dumpfe, theils auch namentlich beim Menschen mehr 
oder minder deutliche Resonanz als Ahnung verspiirt’’—‘* Phil- 
osophy of the Unconscious,” 3d ed., p. 100 


134 Unconscious Memory 


fact which we observe but cannot explain, and the reader 
may say that he prefers to take his stand here, and be 
content with regarding instinct simply as a matter of 
fact, the explanation of which is at present beyond our 
reach. Against this it must be urged, firstly, that clair- 
voyance is not confined to instinct, but is found also in 
man; secondly, that clairvoyance is by no means present 
in all instincts, and that therefore our experience shows 
us clairvoyance and instinct as two distinct things— 
clairvoyance being of great use in explaining instinct, but 
instinct serving nothing to explain clairvoyance ; thirdly 
and lastly, that the clairvoyance of the individual will 
not continue to be so incomprehensible to us, but will be 
perfectly well explained in the further course of our in- 
vestigation, while we must give up all hope of explaining 
instinct in any other way. 

The conception we have thus arrived at enables us to 
regard instinct as the innermost kernel, so to speak, of 
every living being. That this is actually the case is shown 
by the instincts of self-preservation and of the continua- 
tion of the species which we observe throughout creation, 
and by the heroic self-abandonment with which the in- 
dividual will sacrifice welfare, and even life, at the bidding 
of instinct. We see this when we think of the caterpillar, 
and how she repairs her cocoon until she yields to ex- 
haustion ; of the bird, and how she will lay herself to 
death ; of the disquiet and grief displayed by all migra- 
tory animals if they are prevented from migrating. A 
captive cuckoo will always die at the approach of winter 
through despair at being unable to fly away ; so will the 
vineyard snail if it is hindered of its winter sleep. The 
weakest mother will encounter an enemy far surpassing 
her in strength, and suffer death cheerfully for her off- 
spring’s sake. Every year we see fresh cases of people 
who have been unfortunate going mad or committing 
suicide. Women who have survived the Cesarian opera- 
tion allow themselves so little to be deterred from further 


Translation from Von Hartmann 135 


childbearing through fear of this frightful and generally 
fatal operation, that they will undergo it no less than 
three times. Can we suppose that what so closely re- 
sembles demoniacal possession can have come about 
through something engrafted on to the soul as a mechanism 
foreign to its inner nature,! or through conscious delibera- 
tion which adheres always to a bare egoism, and is utterly 
incapable of such self-sacrifice for the sake of offspring as 
is displayed by the procreative and maternal instincts ? 

We have now, finally, to consider how it arises that 
the instincts of any animal species are so similar within 
the limits of that species—a circumstance which has not 
a little contributed to the engrafted-mechanism theory. 
But it is plain that like causes will be followed by like 
effects; and this should afford sufficient explanation. 
The bodily mechanism, for example, of all the individuals 
of a species is alike; so again are their capabilities and 
the outcomes of their conscious intelligence—though this 
indeed, is not the case with man, nor in some measure 
even with the highest animals; and it is through this 
want of uniformity that there is such a thing as indi- 
viduality. The external conditions of all the individuals 
of a species are also tolerably similar, and when they 
differ essentially, the instincts are likewise different—a 
fact in support of which no examples are necessary. From 
like conditions of mind and body (and this includes like 
predispositions of brain and ganglia) and like exterior 
circumstances, like desires will follow as a necessary logical 
consequence. Again, from like desires and like inward 
and outward circumstances, a like choice of means— 
that is to say, like instincts—must ensue. These last two 
steps would not be conceded without restriction if the 
question were one involving conscious deliberation, but 

1‘ TJnd eine so damonische Gewalt sollte durch etwas ausgeiibt 
werden kdnnen, was als ein dem inneren Wesen fremder Mechanismus 
dem Geiste aufgepfropft ist, oder gar durch eine bewusste Ueberle- 


gung, welche doch stets nur im kahlen Egoismus stecken bleibt,”’ 
&c.—‘‘ Philosophy of the Unconscious,”’ 3d ed., p. 101. 


136 Unconscious Memory 


as these logical consequences are supposed to follow from 
the unconscious, which takes the right step unfailingly 
without vacillation or delay so long as the premises are 
similar, the ensuing desires and the instincts to adopt the 
means for their gratification will be similar also. 

Thus the view which we have taken concerning instinct 
explains the very last point which it may be thought 
worth while to bring forward in support of the opinions of 
our opponents. | 

I will conclude this chapter with the words of Schelling : 

“ Thoughtful minds will hold the phenomena of animal 
instinct to belong to the most important of all phenomena, 
and to be the true touchstone of a durable philosophy.” 


CAAT Wincor 
Remarks upon Von Hartmann’s position in regard to instinct. 


NCERTAIN how far the foregoing chapter is not 

better left without comment of any kind, I neverthe- 

less think that some of my readers may be helped by the 

following extracts from the notes I took while translating. 

I will give them as they come, without throwing them into 
connected form. 


Von Hartmann defines instinct as action done with a 
purpose, but without consciousness of purpose. 

The building of her nest by a bird is an instinctive 
action ; it is done with a purpose, but it is arbitrary to 
say that the bird has no knowledge of that purpose. Some 
hold that birds when they are building their nest know 
as well that they mean to bring up a family in it as a 
young married couple do when they build themselves a 
house. This is the conclusion which would be come to by 
a plain person on a primé facie view of the facts, and 
Von Hartmann shows no reason for modifying it. 

A better definition of instinct would be that it is in- 
herited knowledge in respect of certain facts, and of the 
most suitable manner in which to deal with them. 


Von Hartmann speaks of ‘“‘a mechanism of brain or 
mind” contrived by nature, and again of “a psychical 
organisation,’ as though it were something distinct from 
a physical organisation. 

We can conceive of such a thing as mechanism of brain, 


137 


138 Unconscious Memory 


for we have seen brain and handled it ; but until we have 
seen a mind and handled it, or at any rate been enabled 
to draw inferences which will warrant us in conceiving of 
it as a material substance apart from bodily substance, 
we cannot infer that it has an organisation apart from 
bodily organisation. Does Von Hartmann mean that we 
have two bodies—a body-body, and a soul-body ? 





He says that no one will call the action of the spider 
instinctive in voiding the fluids from its glands when they 
are too full. Why not ? 


He is continually personifying instinct ; thus he speaks — 
of the “‘ ends proposed to itself by the instinct,” of “ the 
blind unconscious purpose of the instinct,” of “an 
unconscious purpose constraining the volition of the 
bird,” of “‘ each variation and modification of the in- 
stinct,”’ as though instinct, purpose, and, later on, clair- 
voyance, were persons, and not words characterising a 
certain class of actions. The ends are proposed to itself 
by the animal, not by the instinct. Nothing but mischief | 
can come of a mode of expression which does not keep 
this clearly in view. 





It must not be supposed that the same cuckoo is in the 
habit of laying in the nests of several different species, 
and of changing the colour of her eggs according to that | 
of the eggs of the bird in whose nest she lays. I have 
inquired from Mr. R. Bowdler Sharpe of the ornitho- 
logical department at the British Museum, who kindly 
gives it me as his opinion that though cuckoos do imitate 
the eggs of the species on whom they foist their young 
ones, yet one cuckoo will probably lay in the nest of one 
species also, and will stick to that species for life. If so, 
the same race of cuckoos may impose upon the same 


Notes on Foregoing Chapter 139 


species for generations together. The instinct will even 
thus remain a very wonderful one, but it is not at all in- 
consistent with the theory put forward by Professor 
Hering and myself. 





Returning to the idea of psychical mechanism, he 
admits that ‘‘it is itself so obscure that we can hardly 
form any idea concerning it,”! and then goes on to claim 
for it that it explains a great many other things. This 
must have been the passage which Mr. Sully had in view 
when he very justly wrote that Von Hartmann “ dog- 
matically closes the field of physical inquiry, and takes 
refuge in a phantom which explains everything, simply 
because it is itself incapable of explanation.” 


ee, 


According to Von Hartmann? the unpractised animal 
manifests its instinct as perfectly as the practised. This 
is not the case. The young animal exhibits marvellous 
proficiency, but it gains by experience. I have watched 
sparrows, which I can hardly doubt to be young ones, 
spend a whole month in trying to build their nest, and 
give it up in the end as hopeless. I have watched three 
such cases this spring in a tree not twenty feet from my 
own window and on a level with my eye, so that I have 
been able to see what was going on at all hours of the 
day. In each case the nest was made well and rapidly 
up to a certain point, and then got top-heavy and tumbled 
over, so that little was left on the tree: it was recon- 
structed and reconstructed over and over again, always 
with the same result, till at last in all three cases the birds 
gave up in despair. I believe the older and stronger birds 
secured the fixed and best sites, driving the younger birds 
to the trees, and that the art of building nests in trees is 
dying out among house-sparrows. 


1 Page 100 of this vol. 2 Pp, 106, 107 of this vol. 


140 Unconscious Memory 


He declares that instinct is not due to organisation so 
much as organisation to instinct.1 The fact is, that 
neither can claim precedence of or pre-eminence over the 
other. Instinct and organisation are only mind and body, 
or mind and matter; and these are not two separable 
things, but one and inseparable, with, as it were, two 
sides, the one of which is a function of the other. There 
was never yet either matter without mind, however low, 
nor mind, however high, without a material body of some 
sort ; there can be no change in one without a correspond- 
ing change in the other; neither came before the other ; 
neither can either cease to change or cease to be; for 
“to be”’ is to continue changing, so that ‘to be” and 
“to change ”’ are one. 


Whence, he asks, comes the desire to gratify an instinct 
before experience of the pleasure that will ensue on grati- 
fication? This is a pertinent question, but it is met by 
Professor Hering with the answer that this is due to 
memory—to the continuation in the germ of vibrations 
that were vibrating in the body of the parent, and which, 
when stimulated by vibrations of a suitable rhythm, be- 
come more and more powerful till they suffice to set the 
body in visible action. For my own part I only venture 
to maintain that it is due to memory, that is to say, to 
an enduring sense on the part of the germ of the action 
it took when in the person of its ancestors, and of the 
gratification which ensued thereon. This meets Von Hart- 
mann’s whole difficulty. 





The glacier is not snow. It is snow packed tight into 
a small compass, and has thus lost all trace of its original 
form. How incomplete, however, would be any theory 
of glacial action which left out of sight the origin of the 
glacier in snow! Von Hartmann loses sight of the origin 


1 Page 100 of this vol. 





Notes on Foregoing Chapter 141 


of instinctive in deliberative actions because the two 
classes of action are now in many respects different. His 
philosophy of the unconscious fails to consider what is the 
normal process by means of which such common actions 
as we can watch, and whose history we can follow, have 
come to be done unconsciously. 


He says,! ‘‘ How inconceivable is the supposition of a 
mechanism, &c., &c., how clear and simple, on the other 
hand, is the view that there is an unconscious purpose 
constraining the volition of the bird to the use of the 
fitting means.” Does he mean that there is an actual 
thing—an unconscious purpose—something outside the 
bird, as it were a man, which lays hold of the bird and 
makes it do this or that, as a master makes a servant do 
his bidding ? If so, he again personifies the purpose itself, 
and must therefore embody it, or be talking in a manner 
which plain people cannot understand. If, on the other 
hand, he means ‘‘how simple is the view that the bird 
acts unconsciously,” this is not more simple than sup- 
posing it to act consciously ; and what ground has he for 
supposing that the bird is unconscious? It is as simple, 
and as much in accordance with the facts, to suppose that 
the bird feels the air to be colder, and knows that she 
must warm her eggs if she is to hatch them, as consciously 
-as a mother knows that she must not expose her new- 
born infant to the cold. 


ee en ee 


On page 99 of this book we find Von Hartmann saying 
that if it is once granted that the normal and abnormal 
manifestations of instinct spring from a single source, then 
the objection that the modification is due to conscious 
knowledge will be found to be a suicidal one later on, in 
so far as it is directed against instinct generally. I under- 
stand him to mean that if we admit instinctive action, 


1 Page 98 of this vol. 


142 Unconscious Memory 


and the modifications of that action which more nearly 
resemble results of reason, to be actions of the same 
ultimate kind differing in degree only, and if we thus 
attempt to reduce instinctive action to the prophetic 
strain arising from old experience, we shall be obliged to 
admit that the formation of the embryo is ultimately due 
to reflection—which he seems to think is a reductio ad 
absurdum of the argument. 

Therefore, he concludes, if there is to be only one source, 
the source must*be unconscious, and not conscious. We 
reply, that we do not see the absurdity of the position 
which we grant we have been driven to. We hold that 
the formation of the embryo 1s ultimately due to reflec- 
tion and design. 


ee 


The writer of an article in The Times, April 1, 1880, says 
that servants must be taught their calling before they 
can practise it ; but, in fact, they can only be taught their 
calling by practising it. So Von Hartmann says animals 
must feel the pleasure consequent on gratification of an . 
instinct before they can be stimulated to act upon the 
instinct by a knowledge of the pleasure that will ensue. 
This sounds logical, but in practice a little performance 
and a little teaching—a little sense of pleasure and a little 
connection of that pleasure with this or that practice,— 
come up simultaneously from something that we cannot 
see, the two being so small and so much abreast, that we 
do not know which is first, performance or teaching ; and, 
again, action, or pleasure supposed as coming from the 
action. 


’ 


‘ Geistes-mechanismus ”’ comes as near to “ disposition 
of mind,” or, more shortly, ‘“ disposition,’ as so unsatis- 
factory a word can come to anything. Yet, if we trans- 
late it throughout by “ disposition,’’ we shall see how 
little we are being told. 


Notes on Foregoing Chapter 143 


We find on page 114 that “ all instinctive actions give 
us an impression of absolute security and infallibility ”’ ; 
that “ the will is never weak or hesitating, as it is when 
inferences are being drawn consciously.” “‘ We never,”’ 
Von Hartmann continues, “‘ find instinct making mistakes.”’ 
Passing over the fact that instinct is again personified, the 
statement is still incorrect. Instinctive actions are cer- 
tainly, as a general rule, performed with less uncertainty 
than deliberate ones; this is explicable by the fact that 
they have been more often practised, and thus reduced 
more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is 
more certain than that animals acting under the guidance 
of inherited experience or instinct frequently make mis- 
takes which with further practice they correct. Von 
Hartmann has abundantly admitted that the manner of 
an instinctive action is often varied in correspondence 
with variation in external circumstances. It is impossible 
to see how this does not involve both possibility of error 
and the connection of instinct with deliberation at one 
and the same time. The fact is simply this—when an 
animal finds itself in a like position with that in which 
it has already often done a certain thing in the persons of 
its forefathers, it will do this thing well and easily: when 
it finds the position somewhat, but not unrecognisably, 
altered through change either in its own person or in the 

circumstances exterior to it, it will vary its action with 
greater or less ease according to the nature of the change 
in the position: when the position is gravely altered the 
animal either bungles or is completely thwarted. 


{ 
' 


) Not only does Von Hartmann suppose that instinct 
may, and does involve knowledge antecedent to, and 
independent of, experience—an idea as contrary to the 
_ tendency of modern thought as that of spontaneous genera- 
tion, with which indeed it is identical though presented 
in another shape—but he implies by his frequent use of 


T44 Unconscious Memory 


the word ‘‘ unmittelbar’”’ that a result can come about 
without any cause whatever. So he says, “ Fur die 
unbewusste Erkenntniss, welche nicht durch sinnliche 
Wahrnehmung erworben, sondern als unmitielbarer Besitz,” 
&c.1 Because he does not see where the experience can 
have been gained, he cuts the knot, and denies that there 
has been experience. We say, Look more attentively and 
you will discover the time and manner in which the ex- 
perience was gained. 


a ere 


Again, he continually assumes that animals low down 
in the scale of life cannot know their own business because 
they show no sign of knowing ours. See his remarks on 
Saturnia pavonia minor (page 107), and elsewhere on 
cattle and gadflies. The question is not what can they 
know, but what does their action prove to us that they 
do know. With each species of animal or plant there is 
one profession only, and it is hereditary. With us there 
are many professions, and they are not hereditary ; so 
that they cannot become instinctive, as they would other- 
wise tend to do. 





He attempts? to draw a distinction between the causes a 
that have produced the weapons and working instruments ~ 
of animals, on the one hand, and those that lead to the ~ 
formation of hexagonal cells by bees, &c., on the other. 
No such distinction can be justly drawn. 


The ghost-stories which Von Hartmann accepts will © 
hardly be accepted by people of sound judgment. There 
is one well-marked distinctive feature between the know- — 
ledge manifested by animals when acting instinctively — 
and the supposed knowledge of seers and clairvoyants. In — 
the first case, the animal never exhibits knowledge except 


1 See page 115 of this volume. * Page 104 of this vol. 


Notes on Foregoing Chapter 145 


upon matters concerning which its race has been conver- 
sant for generations; in the second, the seer is supposed 
to do so. In the first case, a new feature is invariably 
attended with disturbance of the performance and the 
awakening of consciousness and deliberation, unless the 
new matter is too small in proportion to the remaining 
features of the case to attract attention, or unless, though 
really new, it appears so similar to an old feature as to 
be at first mistaken for it ; with the second, it is not even 
professed that the seer’s ancestors have had long experi- 
ence upon the matter concerning which the seer is sup- 
posed to have special insight, and I can imagine no more 
powertul @ priori argument against a belief in such stories. 


Close upon the end of his chapter Von Hartmann touches 
upon the one matter which requires consideration. He 
refers the similarity of instinct that is observable among 
all species to the fact that like causes produce like effects ; 
and I gather, though he does not expressly say so, that 
he considers similarity of instinct in successive genera- 
tions to be referable to the same cause as similarity of 
instinct between all the contemporary members of a 
species. He thus raises the one objection against referring 
the phenomena of heredity to memory which I think need 
be gone into with any fulness. I will, however, reserve 
this matter for my concluding chapters. 

Von Hartmann concludes his chapter with a quotation 
from Schelling, to the effect that the phenomena of animal 
instinct are the true touchstone of a durable philosophy ; 
by which I suppose it is intended to say that if a system 
or theory deals satisfactory with animal instinct, it will 
stand, but not otherwise. I can wish nothing better than 
that the philosophy of the unconscious advanced by Von 
Hartmann be tested by this standard. 


Chapter X 


Recapitulation and statement of an objection. 


HE true theory of unconscious action, then, is that 
of Professor Hering, from whose lecture it is no 
strained conclusion to gather that he holds the action of 
all living beings, from the moment of their conception to 
that of their fullest development, to be founded in volition 
and design, though these have been so long lost sight of 
that the work is now carried on, as it were, departmentally 
and in due course according to an official routine which 
can hardly now be departed from. 

This involves the older ‘“‘ Darwinism ’”’ and the theory 
of Lamarck, according to which the modification of living 
forms has been effected mainly through the needs of the - 
living forms themselves, which vary with varying con- 
ditions, the survival of the fittest (which, as I see Mr. 
H. B. Baildon has just said, “‘ sometimes comes to mean 
merely the survival of the survivors ’’*) being taken almost 
as a matter of course. According to this view of evolution, 
there is a remarkable analogy between the development 
of living organs or tools and that of those organs or tools 
external to the body which has been so rapid during the 
last few thousand years. 

Animals and plants, according to Professor Hering, are 
euided throughout their development, and preserve the 
due order in each step which they take, through memory 
of the course they took on past occasions when in the 
persons of their ancestors. I am afraid I have already 
too often said that if this memory remains for long periods 


1‘ The Spirit of Nature.” J. A. Churchill & Co., 1880, p. 39. 
146 


Statement of an Objection 147 


together latent and without effect, it is because the un- 
dulations of the molecular substance of the body which 
are its supposed explanation are during these periods too 
feeble to generate action, until they are augmented in 
force through an accession of suitable undulations issuing 
from exterior objects; or, in other words, until recollec- 
tion is stimulated by a return of the associated ideas. On 
this the external agitation becomes so much enhanced, that 
equilibrium is visibly disturbed, and the action ensues 
which is proper to the vibration of the particular sub- 
stance under the particular conditions. This, at least, is 
what I suppose Professor Hering to intend. 

Leaving the explanation of memory on one side, and 
confining ourselves to the fact of memory only, a cater- 
pillar on being just hatched is supposed, according to this 
theory, to lose its memory of the time it was in the egg, 
and to be stimulated by an intense but unconscious recol- 
lection of the action taken by its ancestors when they were 
first hatched. It is guided in the course it takes by the 
experience it can thus command. Each step it takes re- 
calls a new recollection, and thus it goes through its 
development as a performer performs a piece of music, 
each bar leading his recollection to the bar that should 
next follow. 

In “ Life and Habit’ will be found examples of the 
manner in which this view solves a number of difficulties 
for the explanation of which the leading men of science 
express themselves at a loss. The following from Pro- 
fessor Huxley’s recent work upon crayfish may serve 
for an example. Professor Huxley writes :— 


It is a widely received notion that the energies of living 
matter have a tendency to decline and finally disappear, 
and that the death of the body as a whole is a necessary 
correlate of its life. That all living beings sooner or later 
perish needs no demonstration, but it would be difficult to 
find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they needs must 
do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or later must 
be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts, 


148 Unconscious Memory 


does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is con- 
tinually renewed and repaired; and though it is true that 
individual components of the body are constantly dying, 
yet their places are taken by vigorous successors. A city 
remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its 
inhabitants ; and such an organism as a crayfish is only a 
corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially independent 
individualities.—The Crayfish, p. 127. 


Surely the theory which I have indicated above makes 
the reason plain why no organism can permanently out- 
live its experience of past lives. The death of such a body 
corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition 
becoming more complex than there is memory of past 
experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insub- 
ordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, 
and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. 
There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the 
conception that death is the necessary end of all living 
beings, and who consider even the gentlest death from old 
age as violent and abnormal; so Professor Huxley seems 
to find a difficulty in seeing that though a city commonly 
outlives many generations of its citizens, yet cities and 
states are in the end no less mortal than individuals. 
“The city,” he says, “remains.” Yes, but not for ever. 
When Professor Huxley can find a city that will last for 
ever, he may wonder that a crayfish does not last for 
ever. 

I have already here and elsewhere said all that I can 
yet bring forward in support of Professor Hering’s theory ; 
it now remains for me to meet the most troublesome 
objection to it that I have been able to think of—an 
objection which I had before me when I wrote “ Life and 
Habit,’ but which then as now I believe to be unsound. 
Seeing, however, as I have pointed out at the end of the 
preceding chapter, that Von Hartmann has touched upon 
it, and being aware that a plausible case can be made out 
for it, I will state it and refute it here. When I say refute 
it, I do not mean that I shall have done with it—for it is 


Statement of an Objection 149 


plain that it opens up a vaster question in the relations 
between the so-called organic and inorganic worlds—but 
that I will refute the supposition that it any way militates 
against Professor Hering’s theory. 

Why, it may be asked, should we go out of our way to 
invent unconscious memory—the existence of which must 
at the best remain an inference!—when the observed fact 
that like antecedents are invariably followed by like con- 
sequents should be sufficient for our purpose? Why 
should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given 
condition will always become a butterfly within a certain 
time be connected with memory, when it is not pretended 
that memory has anything to do with the invariableness 
with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in certain 
proportions make water ? 

We assume confidently that if a drop of water were de- 
composed into its component parts, and if these were 
brought together again, and again decomposed and again 
brought together any number of times over, the results 
would be invariably the same, whether decomposition or 
combination, yet no one will refer the invariableness of 
the action during each repetition, to recollection by the 
gaseous molecules of the course taken when the process 
was last repeated. On the contrary, we are assured that 
molecules in some distant part of the world, which had 
never entered into such and such a known combination 
themselves, nor held concert with other molecules that 
had been so combined, and which, therefore, could have 
had no experience and no memory, would none the less 
act upon one another in that one way in which other like 
combinations of atoms have acted under like circum- 
stances, as readily as though they had been combined and 
separated and recombined again a hundred or a hundred 
thousand times. It is this assumption, tacitly made by 


1 T have put these words into the mouth of my supposed objector, 
and shall put others like them, because they are characteristic ; but 
nothing can become so well known as to escape being an inference. 


150 Unconscious Memory 


every man, beast, and plant in the universe, throughout 
all time and in every action of their lives, that has made 
any action possible, lying, as it does, at the root of all 
experience. 

As we admit of no doubt concerning the main result, 
so we do not suppose an alternative to lie before any atom 
of any molecule at any moment during the process of 
their combination. This process is, in all probability, an 
exceedingly complicated one, involving a multitude of 
actions and subordinate processes, which follow one upon 
the other, and each one of which has a beginning, a middle, 
and an end, though they all come to pass in what appears 
to be an instant of time. Yet at no point do we conceive 
of any atom as swerving ever such a little to right or left 
of a determined course, but invest each one of them with 
so much of the divine attributes as that with it there shall 
be no variableness, neither shadow of turning. 

We attribute this regularity of action to what we call 
the necessity of things, as determined by the nature of 
the atoms and the circumstances in which they are placed. 
We say that only one proximate result can ever arise © 
from any given combination. If, then, so great uniformity 
of action as nothing can exceed is manifested by atoms to 
which no one will impute memory, why this desire for 
memory, as though it were the only way of accounting 
for regularity of action in living beings? Sameness of 
action may be seen abundantly where there is no room 
for anything that we can consistently call memory. In 
these cases we say that it is due to sameness of substance 
in same circumstances. 

The most cursory reflection upon our actions will show 
us that it is no more possible for living action to have 
more than one set of proximate consequents at any given 
time than for oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in the 
proportions proper for the formation of water. Why, 
then, not recognise this fact, and ascribe repeated simi- 
larity of living action to the reproduction of the necessary 


Statement of an Objection 151 


antecedents, with no more sense of connection between 
the steps in the action, or memory of similar action taken 
before, than we suppose on the part of oxygen and hydrogen 
molecules between the several occasions on which they 
may have been disunited and reunited ? 

A boy catches the measles not because he remembers 
having caught them in the persons of his father and 
mother, but because he is a fit soil for a certain kind of 
seed to grow upon. In like manner he should be said to 
grow his nose because he is a fit combination for a nose 
to spring from. Dr. X ’s father died of angina pectoris 
at the age of forty-nine; so did Dr. X Can it be 
pretended that Dr. X remembered having died of 
angina pectoris at the age of forty-nine when in the person 
of his father, and accordingly, when he came to be forty- 
nine years old himself, died also? For this to hold, Dr. 
xX ’s father must have begotten him after he was 
dead ; for the son could not remember the father’s death 
before it happened. 

As for the diseases of old age, so very commonly in- 
herited, they are developed for the most part not only 
long after the average age of reproduction, but at a time 
when no appreciable amount of memory of any previous 
existence can remain; for a man will not have many 
male ancestors who become parents at over sixty years 
old, nor female ancestors who did so at over forty. By 
our own showing, therefore, recollection can have nothing 
to do with the matter. Yet who can doubt that gout is 
due to inheritance as much as eyes and noses? In what 
respects do the two things differ so that we should refer 
the inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while deny- 
ing any connection between memory and gout ? We may 
have a ghost of a pretence for saying that a man grew a 
nose by rote, or even that he catches the measles or whoop- 
ing-cough by rote during his boyhood ; but do we mean 
to say that he develops the gout by rote in his old age if 
he comes of a gouty family? If, then, rote and red-tape 














152 Unconscious Memory 


have nothing to do with the one, why should they with 
the other ? 

Remember also the cases in which aged females develop 
male characteristics. Here are growths, often of not in- 
considerable extent, which make their appearance during 
the decay of the body, and grow with greater and greater 
vigour in the extreme of old age, and even for days after 
death itself. It can hardly be doubted that an especial 
tendency to develop these characteristics runs as an in- 
heritance in certain families; here then is perhaps the 
best case that can be found of a development strictly 
inherited, but having clearly nothing whatever to do with 
memory. Why should not all development stand upon 
the same footing ? 

A friend who had been arguing with me for some time 
as above, concluded with the following words :— 

“If you cannot be content with the similar action of 
similar substances (living or non-living) under similar 
circumstances—if you cannot accept this as an ultimate 
fact, but consider it necessary to connect repetition of 
similar action with memory before you can rest in it and 
be thankful—be consistent, and introduce this memory 
which you find so necessary into the inorganic world also. 
Either say that a chrysalis becomes a butterfly because it 
is the thing that it is, and, being that kind of thing, must 
act in such and such a manner and in such a manner only, 
so that the act of one generation has no more to do with 
the act of the next than the fact of cream being churned 
into butter in a dairy one day has to do with other cream 
being churnable into butter in the following week—either 
say this, or else develop some mental condition—which 
I have no doubt you will be very well able to do if you feel 
the want of it—in which you can make out a case for 
saying that oxygen and hydrogen on being brought to- 
gether, and cream on being churned, are in some way 
acquainted with, and mindful of, action taken by other 
cream and other oxygen and hydrogen on past occasions.”’ 


Statement of an Objection 153 


I felt inclined to reply that my friend need not twit me 
with being able to develop a mental organism if I felt the 
need of it, for his own ingenious attack on my position, 
and indeed every action of his life was but an example of 
this omnipresent principle. 

When he was gone, however, I thought over what he 
had been saying. I endeavoured to see how far I could 
get on without volition and memory, and reasoned as 
follows :—A repetition of like antecedents will be certainly 
followed by a repetition of like consequents, whether the 
agents be men and women or chemical substances. “ If 
there be two cowards perfectly similar in every respect 
and if they be subjected in a perfectly similar way to two 
terrifying agents, which are themselves perfectly similar 
there are few who will not expect a perfect similarity in 
the running away, even though ten thousand years inter- 
vene between the original combination and its repetition.’’! 
Here certainly there is no coming into play of memory, 
more than in the pan of cream on two successive churning 
days, yet the action is similar. 

A clerk in an office has an hour in the middle of the 
day for dinner. About half-past twelve he begins to feel 
hungry ; at once he takes down his hat and leaves the 
office. He does not yet know the neighbourhood, and on 
getting down into the street asks a policeman at the 
corner which is the best eating-house within easy distance. 
The policeman tells him of three houses, one of which is 
a little further off than the other two, but is cheaper. 
Money being a greater object to him than time, the clerk 
decides on going to the cheaper house. He goes, is satis- 
fied, and returns. 

Next day he wants his dinner at the same hour, and— 
it will be said—remembering his satisfaction of yesterday, 
will go to the same place as before. But what has his 
memory to do with it? Suppose him to have entirely 
forgotten all the circumstances of the preceding day from 


1 <«*Frewhon,” chap. xxiii. 


154 Unconscious Memory 


the moment of his beginning to feel hungry onward, 
though in other respects sound in mind and body, and un- 
changed generally. At half-past twelve he would begin 
to be hungry ; but his beginning to be hungry cannot be 
connected with his remembering having begun to be 
hungry yesterday. He would begin to be hungry just as 
much whether he remembered or no. At one o'clock he 
again takes down his hat and leaves the office, not because 
he remembers having done so yesterday, but because he 
wants his hat to go out with. Being again in the street, 
and again ignorant of the neighbourhood (for he remembers 
nothing of yesterday), he sees the same policeman at the 
corner of the street, and asks him the same question 
as before ; the policeman gives him the same answer, and 
money being still an object to him, the cheapest eating- 
house is again selected; he goes there, finds the same 
menu, makes the same choice for the same reasons, eats, 
is satisfied, and returns. 

What similarity of action can be greater than this, and 
at the same time more incontrovertible? But it has 
nothing to do with memory; on the contrary, it is just — 
because the clerk has no memory that his action of the 
second day so exactly resembles that of the first. As long 
as he has,no power of recollection, he will day after day 
repeat the same actions in exactly the same way, until 
some external circumstances, such as his being sent away, 
modify the situation. Till this or some other modification 
occurs, he will day after day go down into the street with- 
out knowing where to go; day after day he will see the 
same policeman at the corner of the same street, and (for 
we may as well suppose that the policeman has no memory 
too) he will ask and be answered, and ask and be answered, 
till he and the policeman die of old age. This similarity 
of action is plainly due to that—whatever it is—which 
ensures that like persons or things when placed in like 
circumstances shall behave in like manner. 

Allow the clerk ever such a little memory, and the simi- 


Statement of an Objection 155 


larity of action will disappear ; for the fact of remember- 
ing what happened to him on the first day he went out 
in search of dinner will be a modification in him in regard 
to his then condition when he next goes out to get his 
dinner. He had no such memory on the first day, and 
he has upon the second. Some modification of action 
must ensue upon this modification of the actor, and this 
is immediately observable. He wants his dinner, indeed, 
goes down into the street, and sees the policeman as yes- 
terday, but he does not ask the policeman; he remembers 
what the policeman told him and what he did, and there- 
fore goes straight to the eating-house without wasting 
time: nor does he dine off the same dish two days run- 
ning, for he remembers what he had yesterday and likes 
variety. If, then, similarity of action is rather hindered 
than promoted by memory, why introduce it into such 
cases as the repetition of the embryonic processes by suc- 
cessive generations? The embryos of a well-fixed breed, 
such as the goose, are almost as much alike as water is 
to water, and by consequence one goose comes to be 
almost as like another as water to water. Why should it 
not be supposed to become so upon the same grounds— 
namely, that it is made of the same stuffs, and put to- 
gether in like proportions in the same manner ? 


Chapter XI 


On Cycles. 


fa Eaise one faith on which all normal living beings con- 
sciously or unconsciously act, is that like antecedents 
will be followed by like consequents. This is the one true 
and catholic faith, undemonstrable, but except a living 
being believe which, without doubt it shall perish ever- 
lastingly. In the assurance of this all action is taken. 

But if this fundamental article is admitted, and it can- 
not be gainsaid, it follows that if ever a complete cycle 
were formed, so that the whole universe of one instant 
were to repeat itself absolutely in a subsequent one, no 
matter after what interval of time, then the course of the 
events between these two moments would go on repeating 
itself for ever and ever afterwards in due order, down to 
the minutest detail, in an endless series of cycles like a 
circulating decimal. For the universe comprises every- 
thing ; there could therefore be no disturbance from with- 
out. Once a cycle, always a cycle. 

Let us suppose the earth, of given weight, moving with 
given momentum in a given path, and under given con- 
ditions in every respect, to find itself at any one time 
conditioned in all these respects as it was conditioned at 
some past moment; then it must move exactly in the 
same path as the one it took when at the beginning of the 
cycle it has just completed, and must therefore in the 
course of time fulfil a second cycle, and therefore a third, 
and so on for ever and ever, with no more chance of escape 
than a circulating decimal has, if the circumstances have 
been reproduced with perfect accuracy. 


156 


On Cycles ey 


We see something very like this actually happen in the 
yearly revolutions of the planets round the sun. But the 
relations between, we will say, the earth and the sun are 
not reproduced absolutely. These relations deal only with 
a small part of the universe, and even in this small part 
the relation of the parts inter se has never yet been re- 
produced with the perfection of accuracy necessary for our 
argument. They are liable, moreover, to disturbance 
from events which may or may not actually occur (as, 
for example, our being struck by a comet, or the sun’s 
coming within a certain distance of another sun), but of 
which, if they do occur, no one can foresee the effects. 
Nevertheless the conditions have been so nearly repeated 
that there is no appreciable difference in the relations 
between the earth and sun on one New Year’s Day and 
on another, nor is there reason for expecting such change 
within any reasonable time. 

If there is to be an eternal series of cycles involving the 
whole universe, it is plain that not one single atom must 
be excluded. Exclude a single molecule of hydrogen from 
the ring, or vary the relative positions of two molecules 
only, and the charm is broken; an element of disturb- 
ance has been introduced, of which the utmost that can 
be said is that it may not prevent the ensuing of a long 
series of very nearly perfect cycles before similarity in 
recurrence is destroyed, but which must inevitably per- 
vent absolute identity of repetition. The movement of 
the series becomes no longer a cycle, but spiral, and con- 
vergent or divergent at a greater or less rate according to 
circumstances. We cannot conceive of all the atoms in 
the universe standing twice over in absolutely the same 
relation each one of them to every other. There are too 
many of them and they are too much mixed; but, as has 
been just said, in the planets and their satellites we do see 
large groups of atoms whose movements recur with some 
approach to precision. The same holds good also with 
certain comets and with the sun himself. The result is 


158 Unconscious Memory 


that our days and nights and seasons follow one another 
with nearly perfect regularity from year to year, and have 
done so for as long time as we know anything for certain. 
A vast preponderance of all the action that takes place 
around us is cycular action. 

Within the great cycle of the planetary revolution of 
our own earth, and as a consequence thereof, we have the 
minor cycle of the phenomena of the seasons; these 
generate atmospheric cycles. Water is evaporated from 
the ocean and conveyed to mountain ranges, where it is 
cooled, and whence it returns again to the sea. This 
cycle of events is being repeated again and again with 
little appreciable variation. The tides and winds in cer- 
tain latitudes go round and round the world with what 
amounts to continuous regularity. There are storms of 
wind and rain called cyclones. In the case of these, the 
cycle is not very complete, the movement, therefore, is 
spiral, and the tendency to recur is comparatively soon 
lost. It is a common saying that history repeats itself, 
so that anarchy will lead to despotism and despotism to 
anarchy ; every nation can point to instances of men’s 
minds having gone round and round so nearly in a per- — 
fect cycle that many revolutions have occurred before the 
cessation of a tendency to recur. Lastly, in the generation 
of plants and animals we have, perhaps, the most striking 
and common example of the inevitable tendency of all 
action to repeat itself when it has once proximately done 
so. Let only one living being have once succeeded in 
producing a being like itself, and thus have returned, so 
to speak, upon itself, and a series of generations must 
follow of necessity, unless some matter interfere which 
had no part in the original combination, and, as it may 
happen, kill the first reproductive creature or all its 
descendants within a few generations. If no such mishap 
occurs as this, and if the recurrence of the conditions is 
sufficiently perfect, a series of generations follows with as 
much certainty as a series of seasons follows upon the 


On Cycles 159 


cycle of the relations between the earth and sun. Let the 
first periodically recurring substance—we will say A—be 
able to recur or reproduce itself, not once only, but many 
times over, as A!, A2, &c.; let A also have consciousness 
and a sense of self-interest, which qualities must, ex hypo- 
thesi, be reproduced in each one of its offsprings ; let these 
get placed in circumstances which differ sufficiently to 
destroy the cycle in theory without doing so practically— 
that is to say, to reduce the rotation to a spiral, but to a 
spiral with so little deviation from perfectly cycularity as 
for each revolution to appear practically a cycle, though 
after many revolutions the deviation becomes perceptible ; 
then some such differentiations of animal and vegetable 
life as we actually see follow as matters of course. A* and 
A2 have a sense of self-interest as A had, but they are 
not precisely in circumstances similar to A’s, nor, it may 
be, to each other’s; they will therefore act somewhat 
differently, and every living being is modified by a change 
of action. Having become modified, they follow the spirit 
of A’s action more essentially in begetting a creature like 
themselves than in begetting one like A; for the essence 
of A’s act was not the reproduction of A, but the reproduc- 
tion of a creature like the one from which it sprung— 
that is to say, a creature bearing traces in its body of the 
main influences that have worked upon its parent. 

Within the cycle of reproduction there are cycles upon 
cycles in the life of each individual, whether animal or 
plant. Observe the action of our lungs and heart, how 
regular it is, and how a cycle having been once estab- 
lished, it is repeated many millions of times in an indi- 
vidual of average health and longevity. Remember also 
that it is this periodicity—this inevitable tendency of all 
atoms in combination to repeat any combination which 
they have once repeated, unless forcibly prevented from 
doing so—which alone renders nine-tenths of our 
mechanical inventions of practical use to us. There is 
no internal periodicity about a hammer or a saw, but 


160 Unconscious Memory 


there is in the steam-engine or watermill when once set in 
motion. The actions of these machines recur in a regular 
series, at regular intervals, with the unerringness of circu- 
lating decimals. 

When we bear in mind, then, the omnipresence of this 
tendency in the world around us, the absolute freedom 
from exception which attends its action, the manner in 
which it holds equally good upon the vastest and the 
smallest scale, and the completeness of its accord with our 
ideas of what must inevitably happen when a like com- 
bination is placed in circumstances like those in which it 
was placed before—when we bear in mind all this, is it 
possible not to connect the facts together, and to refer 
cycles of living generations to the same unalterableness in 
the action of like matter under like circumstances which 
makes Jupiter and Saturn revolve round the sun, or the 
piston of a steam-engine move up and down as long as 
the steam acts upon it ? 

But who will attribute memory to the hands of a clock, 
to a piston-rod, to air or water in a storm or in course of 
evaporation, to the earth and planets in their circuits 
round the sun, or to the atoms of the universe, if they too ° 
be moving in a cycle vaster than we can take account of?! 
And if not, why introduce it into the embryonic develop- 
ment of living beings, when there is not a particle of 
evidence in support of its actual presence, when regu- 
larity of action can be ensured just as well without it as 
with it, and when at the best it is considered as existing 
under the circumstances which it baffles us to conceive, inas- 
much as it is supposed to be exercised without any con- 
scious recollection ? Surely a memory which is exercised 
without any consciousness of recollecting is only a peri- 
phrasis for the absence of any memory at all. 


*It must be remembered that this passage is put as if in the 
mouth of an objector. 


Chapter XII 


Refutation—Memory at once a promoter and a disturber of 
uniformity of action and structure. 


O meet the objections in the two foregoing chapters, 
I need do little more than show that the fact of 
certain often inherited diseases and developments, whether 
of youth or old age, being obviously not due to a memory 
on the part of offspring of like diseases and developments 
in the parents, does not militate against supposing that 
embryonic and youthful development generally is due to 
memory. 

This is the main part of the objection ; the rest resolves 
itself into an assertion that there is no evidence in support 
of instinct and embryonic development being due to 
memory, and a contention that the necessity of each 
particular moment in each particular case is sufficient to 
account for the facts without the introduction of memory. 

I will deal with these two last points briefly first. As 
regards the evidence in support of the theory that instinct 
and growth are due to a rapid unconscious memory of 
past experiences and developments in the persons of the 
ancestors of the living form in which they appear, I must 
refer my readers to “ Life and Habit,” and to the transla- 
tion of Professor Hering’s lecture given in this volume. I 
will only repeat here that a chrysalis, we will say, is as 
much one and the same person with the chrysalis of its 
preceding generation, as this last is one and the same 
person with the egg or caterpillar from which it sprang. 
You cannot deny personal identity between two succes- 
sive generations without sooner or later denying it during 

M 161 


162 Unconscious Memory 


the successive stages in the single life of what we call one 
individual ; nor can you admit personal identity through 
the stages of a long and varied life (embryonic and post- 
natal) without admitting it to endure through an endless 
series of generations. 

The personal identity of successive generations being 
admitted, the possibility of the second of two generations 
remembering what happened to it in the first is obvious. 
The a@ priori objection, therefore, is removed, and the 
question becomes one of fact—does the offspring act as 
if it remembered ? 

The answer to this question is not only that it does so 
act, but that it is not possible to account for either its 
development or its early instinctive actions upon any 
other hypothesis than that of its remembering, and re- 
membering exceedingly well. 

The only alternative is to declare with Von Hartmann 
that a living being may display a vast and varied informa- 
tion concerning all manner of details, and be able to per- 
form most intricate operations, independently of experience 
and practice. Once admit knowledge independent of ex- 
perience, and farewell to sober sense and reason from that — 
moment. 

Firstly, then, we show that offspring has had every 
facility for remembering ; secondly, that it shows every 
appearance of having remembered ; thirdly, that no other 
hypothesis except memory can be brought forward, so as 
to account for the phenomena of instinct and heredity 
generally, which is not easily reducible to an absurdity. 
Beyond this we do not care to go, and must allow those 
to differ from us who require further evidence. 

As regards the argument that the necessity of each 
moment will account for likeness of result, without there 
being any need for introducing memory, I admit that 
likeness of consequents is due to likeness of antecedents, 
and I grant this will hold as good with embryos as with 
oxygen and hydrogen gas; what will cover the one wil 


Refutation 163 


cover the other, for the writs of the laws common to all 
matter run within the womb as freely as elsewhere ; but 
admitting that there are combinations into which living 
beings enter with a faculty called memory which has its 
effect upon their conduct, and admitting that such com- 
binations are from time to time repeated (as we observe 
in the case of a practised performer playing a piece of 
music which he has committed to memory), then I main- 
tain that though, indeed, the likeness of one performance 
to its immediate predecessor is due to likeness of the 
combinations immediately preceding the two perform- 
ances, yet memory plays so important a part in both 
these combinations as to make it a distinguishing feature 
in them, and therefore proper to be insisted upon. We 
do not, for example, say that Herr Joachim played such 
and such a sonata without the music, because he was such 
and such an arrangement of matter in such and such 
circumstances, resembling those under which he played 
without music on some past occasion. This goes without 
saying ; we say only that he played the music by heart 
or by memory, as he had often played it before. 

To the objector that a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis 
not because it remembers and takes the action taken by 
its fathers and mothers in due course before it, but because 
when matter is in such a physical and mental state as to 
be called caterpillar, it must perforce assume presently 
such another physical and mental state as to be called 
chrysalis, and that therefore there is no memory in the 
case—to this objector I rejoin that the offspring cater- 
pillar would not have become so like the parent as to 
make the next or chrysalis stage a matter of necessity, 
unless both parent and offspring had been influenced by 
something that we usually call memory. For it is this 
very possession of a common memory which has guided 
the offspring into the path taken by, and hence to a 
virtually same condition with, the parent, and which guided 
the parent in its turn to a state virtually identical with a 


164 Unconscious Memory 


corresponding state in the existence of its own parent. 
To memory, therefore, the most prominent place in the 
transaction is assigned rightly. 

To deny that will guided by memory has anything to 
do with the development of embryos seems like denying 
that a desire to obstruct has anything to do with the 
recent conduct of certain members in the House of 
Commons. What should we think of one who said that the 
action of these gentlemen had nothing to do with a desire 
to embarrass the Government, but was simply the neces- 
sary outcome of the chemical and mechanical forces at 
work, which being such and such, the action which we see 
is inevitable, and has therefore nothing to do with wilful 
obstruction ? We should answer that there was doubt- 
less a great deal of chemical and mechanical action in the 
matter ; perhaps, for aught we knew or cared, it was all 
chemical and mechanical; but if so, then a desire to 
obstruct parliamentary business is involved in certain 
kinds of chemical and mechanical action, and that the 
kinds involving this had preceded the recent proceedings 
of the members in question. If asked to prove this, we 
can get no further than that such action as has been taken 
has never yet been seen except as following after and in 
consequence of a desire to obstruct; that this is our 
nomenclature, and that we can no more be expected to 
change it than to change our mother tongue at the bid- 
ding of a foreigner. 

A little reflection will convince the reader that he will 
be unable to deny will and memory to the embryo with- 
out at the same time denying their existence everywhere, 
and maintaining that they have no place in the acquisition 
of a habit, nor indeed in any human action. He will feel 
that the actions, and the relation of one action to another 
which he observes in embryos is such as is never seen 
except in association with and as a consequence of will 
and memory. He will therefore say that it is due to will 
and memory. To say that these are the necessary out- 


Refutation 165 


come of certain antecedents is not to destroy them: 
granted that they are—a man does not cease to be a man 
_ when we reflect that he has had a father and mother, nor 
do will and memory cease to be will and memory on the 
ground that they cannot come causeless. They are mani- 
fest minute by minute to the perception of all sane people, 
and this tribunal, though not infallible, is nevertheless our 
ultimate court of appeal—the final arbitrator in all dis- 
puted cases. 

We must remember that there is no action, however 
original or peculiar, which is not in respect of far the 
greater number of its details founded upon memory. lia 
desperate man blows his brains out—an action which he 
can do once in a lifetime only, and which none of his 
ancestors can have done before leaving offspring—still 
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the move- 
ments necessary to achieve his end consist of habitual 
movements—movements, that is to say, which were once 
difficult, but which have been practised and practised by 
the help of memory until they are now performed auto- 
matically. We can no more have an action than a creative 
effort of the imagination cut off from memory. Ideas and 
actions seem almost to resemble matter and force in re- 
spect of the impossibility of originating or destroying 
them; nearly all that are, are memories of other ideas 
and actions, transmitted but not created, disappearing 
but not perishing. 

It appears, then, that when in Chapter X. we supposed 
the clerk who wanted his dinner to forget on a second day 
the action he had taken the day before, we still, without 
perhaps perceiving it, supposed him to be guided by 
memory in all the details of his action, such as his taking 
down his hat and going out into the street. We could 
not, indeed, deprive him of all memory without absolutely 
paralysing his action. 

Nevertheless new ideas, new faiths, and new actions do 
in the course of time come about, the living expressions 


166 Unconscious Memory 


of which we may see in the new forms of life which from 
time to time have arisen and are still arising, and in the 
increase of our own knowledge and mechanical inventions. 
But it is only a very little new that is added at a time, and 
that little is generally due to the desire to attain an end 
which cannot be attained by any of the means for which 
there exists a perceived precedent in the memory. When 
this is the case, either the memory is further ransacked 
for any forgotten shreds of details, a combination of which 
may serve the desired purpose ; or action is taken in the 
dark, which sometimes succeeds and becomes a fertile 
source of further combinations ; or we are brought to a 
dead stop. All action is random in respect of any of the 
minute actions which compose it that are not done in 
consequence of memory, real or supposed. So that 
random, or action taken in the dark, or illusion, lies at 
the very root of progress. 

I will now consider the objection that the pheno- 
mena of instinct and embryonic development ought not 
to be ascribed to memory, inasmuch as certain other 
phenomena of heredity, such as gout, cannot be ascribed 
to it. 

Those who object in this way forget that our actions fall 
into two main classes: those which we have often re- 
peated before by means of a regular series of subordinate 
actions beginning and ending at a certain tolerably well- 
defined point—as when Herr Joachim plays a sonata in 
public, or when we dress or undress ourselves ; and actions 
' the details of which are indeed guided by memory, but 
which in their general scope and purpose are new—as when 
we are being married or presented at court. 

At each point in any action of the first of the two kinds 
above referred to there is a memory (conscious or uncon- 
scious according to the less or greater number of times the 
action has been repeated), not only of the steps in the 
present and previous performances which have led up to 
the particular point that may be selected, but also of the 


Refutation 167 


particular point itself ; there is, therefore, at each point 
in a habitual performance a memory at once of like ante- 
cedents and of a like present. 

If the memory, whether of the antecedent or the pre- 
sent, were absolutely perfect ; if the vibration (according 
to Professor Hering) on each repetition existed in its full 
original strength and without having been interfered with 
by any other vibration; and if, again, the new wave 
running into it from exterior objects on each repetition 
of the action were absolutely identical in character with 
the wave that ran in upon the last occasion, then there 
would be no change in the action and no modification or 
improvement could take place. For though indeed the 
latest performance would always have one memory more 
than the latest but one to guide it, yet the memories being 
identical, it would not matter how many or how few they 
were. 

On any repetition, however, the circumstances, external 
or internal, or both, never are absolutely identical: there 
is some slight variation in each individual case, and some 
part of this variation is remembered, with approbation or 
disapprobation as the case may be. 

The fact, therefore, that on each repetition of the 
action there is one memory more than on the last but 
one, and that this memory is slightly different from its 
predecessor, is seen to be an inherent and, ex hy pothest, 
necessarily disturbing factor in all habitual action—and 
the life of an organism should be regarded as the habitual 
action of a single individual, namely, of the organism 1t- 
self, and of its ancestors. This is the key to accumulation 
of improvement, whether in the arts which we assiduously 
practise during our single life, or in the structures and 
instincts of successive generations. The memory does not 
complete a true circle, but, is, as it were, a spiral slightly 
divergent therefrom. It is no longer a perfectly circu- 
lating decimal. Where, on the other hand, there is no 
memory of a like present, where, in fact, the memory iS 


168 Unconscious Memory 


not, so to speak, spiral, there is no accumulation of im- 
provement. The effect of any variation is not trans- 
mitted, and is not thus pregnant of still further change. 

As regards the second of the two classes of actions 
above referred to—those, namely, which are not recurrent 
or habitual, and at no point of which is there a memory of a 
past present like the one which is present now—there will 
have been no accumulation of strong and well-knit memory 
as regards the action as a whole, but action, if taken at 
all, will be taken upon disjointed fragments of individual 
actions (our own and those of other people) pieced together 
with a result more or less satisfactory according to circum- 
stances. 

But it does not follow that the action of two people who 
have had tolerably similar antecedents and are placed in 
tolerably similar circumstances should be more unlike 
each other in this second case than in the first. On the 
contrary, nothing is more common than to observe the 
same kind of people making the same kind of mistake 
when placed for the first time in the same kind of new 
circumstances. I did not say that there would be no same- 
ness of action without memory of a like present. There 
may be sameness of action proceeding from a memory, 
conscious or unconscious, of like antecedents, and a 
presence only of lke presents without recollection of the 
same. 

The sameness of action of like persons placed under like 
circumstances for the first time, resembles the sameness of 
action of inorganic matter under the same combinations. 
Let us for the moment suppose what we call non-living 
substances to be capable of remembering their antecedents, 
and that the changes they undergo are the expressions of 
their recollections. Then I admit, of course, that there is 
not memory in any cream, we will say, that is about to be 
churned of the cream of the preceding week, but the 
common absence of such memory from each week’s cream 
is an element of sameness between the two. And though 


Refutation 169 


no cream can remember having been churned before, yet 
all cream in all time has had nearly identical antecedents, 
and has therefore nearly the same memories, and nearly 
the same proclivities. Thus, in fact, the cream of one 
week is as truly the same as the cream of another week 
from the same cow, pasture, &c., as anything is ever the 
same with anything; for the having been subjected to 
like antecedents engenders the closest similarity that 
we can conceive of, if the substances were like to start 
with. 

The manifest absence of any connecting memory (or 
memory of like presents) from certain of the phenomena 
of heredity, such as, for example, the diseases of old age, 
is now seen to be no valid reason for saying that such 
other and far more numerous and important phenomena 
as those of embryonic development are not phenomena of 
memory. Growth and the diseases of old age do indeed, 
at first sight, appear to stand on the same footing, but 
reflection shows us that the question whether a certain 
result is due to memory or no must be settled not by 
showing that combinations into which memory does not 
certainly enter may yet generate like results, and there- 
fore considering the memory theory disposed of, but by 
the evidence we may be able to adduce in support of the 
fact that the second agent has actually remembered the 
conduct of the first, inasmuch as he cannot be supposed 
able to do what it is plain he can do, except under the 
guidance of memory or experience, and can also be shown 
to have had every opportunity of remembering. When 
either of these tests fails, similarity of action on the part 
of two agents need not be connected with memory of a 
like present as well as of like antecedents, but must, or at 
any rate may, be referred to memory of like antecedents 
only. 

Returning to a parenthesis a few pages back, in which 
I said that consciousness of memory would be less or 
greater according to the greater or fewer number of times 


170 Unconscious Memory 


that the act had been repeated, it may be observed as a 
corollary to this, that the less consciousness of memory the 
greater the uniformity of action, and vice versd. For the 
less consciousness involves the memory’s being more per- 
fect, through a larger number (generally) of repetitions of 
the act that is remembered ; there is therefore a less pro- 
portionate difference in respect of the number of recollec- 
tions of this particular act between the most recent actor 
and the most recent but one. This is why very old civilisa- 
tions, as those of many insects, and the greater number of 
now living organisms, appear to the eye not to change 
at all. 

For example, if an action has been performed only ten 
times, we will say by A, B, C, &c., who are similar in all 
respects, except that A acts without recollection, B with 
recollection of A’s action, C with recollection of both B’s 
and A’s, while J remembers the course taken by A, B, C, 
D, E, F, G, H, and I—the possession of a memory by B 
will indeed so change his action, as compared with A’s, 
that it may well be hardly recognisable. We saw this in 
our example of the clerk who asked the policeman the 
way to the eating-house on one day, but did not ask him 
the next, because he remembered ; but C’s action will not 
be so different from B’s as B’s from A’s, for though C will 
act with a memory of two occasions on which the action 
has been performed, while B recollects only the original 
performance by A, yet B and C both act with the guidance 
of a memory and experience of some kind, while A acted 
without any. Thus the clerk referred to in Chapter X. 
will act on the third day much as he acted on the second 
—that is to say, he will see the policeman at the corner 
of the street, but will not question him. 

When the action is repeated by J for the tenth time, 
the difference between J’s repetition of it and I’s will be 
due solely to the difference between a recollection of nine 
past performances by J against only eight by I, and this 
is so much proportionately less than the difference between 


Refutation [71 


a recollection of two performances and of only one, that a 
less modification of action should be expected. At the 
same time consciousness concerning an action repeated 
for the tenth time should be less acute than on the first 
repetition. Memory, therefore, though tending to disturb 
similarity of action less and less continually, must always 
cause some disturbance. At the same time the possession 
of a memory on the successive repetitions of an action 
after the first, and, perhaps, the first two or three, during 
which the recollection may be supposed still imperfect, 
will tend to ensure uniformity, for it will be one of the 
elements of sameness in the agents—they both acting by 
the light of experience and memory. 

During the embryonic stages and in childhood we are 
almost entirely under the guidance of a practised and 
powerful memory of circumstances which have been often 
repeated, not only in detail and piecemeal, but as a whole, 
and under many slightly varying conditions; thus the 
performance has become well averaged and matured in its 
arrangements, so as to meet all ordinary emergencies. 
We therefore act with great unconsciousness and vary our 
performances little. Babies are much more alike than 
persons of middle age. 

Up to the average age at which our ancestors have had 
children during many generations, we are still guided in 
great measure by memory ; but the variations in external 
circumstances begin to make themselves perceptible in 
our characters. In middle life we live more and more 
continually upon the piecing together of details of memory 
drawn from our personal experience, that is to say, upon 
the memory of our own antecedents ; and this resembles 
the kind of memory we hypothetically attached to cream 
a little time ago. It is not surprising, then, that a son 
who has inherited his father’s tastes and constitution, and 
who lives much as his father had done, should make the 
same mistakes as his father did when he reaches his father’s 
age—we will say of seventy—though he cannot possibly 


172 Unconscious Memory 


remember his father’s having made the mistakes. It were 
to be wished we could, for then we might know better how 
to avoid gout, cancer, or what not. And it is to be noticed 
that the developments of old age are generally things we 
should be glad enough to avoid if we knew how to do so. 


Chapter XIII 


Conclusion. 


I we observed the resemblance between successive 

generations to be as close as that between distilled 
water and distilled water through all time, and if we 
observed that perfect unchangeableness in the action of 
living beings which we see in what we call chemical and 
mechanical combinations, we might indeed suspect that 
memory had as little place among the causes of their 
action as it can have in anything, and that each repetition, 
whether of a habit or the practice of art, or of an em- 
bryonic process in successive generations, was an original 
performance, for all that memory had to do with it. I 
submit, however, that in the case of the reproductive 
forms of life we see just so much variety, in spite of uni- 
formity, as is consistent with a repetition involving not 
only a nearly perfect similarity in the agents and their 
circumstances, but also the little departure therefrom 
that is inevitably involved in the supposition that a 
memory of like presents as well as of like antecedents (as 
distinguished from a memory of like antecedents only) has 
played a part in their development—a cyclonic memory, 
if the expression may be pardoned. 

There is life infinitely lower and more minute than any 
which our most powerful microscopes reveal to us, but 
let us leave this upon one side and begin with the amceba. 
Let us suppose that this structureless morsel of proto- 
plasm is, for all its structurelessness, composed of an in- 
finite number of living molecules, each one of them with 
hopes and fears of its own, and all dwelling together like 


173 


174 Unconscious Memory 


Tekke Turcomans, of whom we read that they live for 
plunder only, and that each man of them is entirely 
independent, acknowledging no constituted authority, but 
that some among them exercise a tacit and undefined 
influence over the others. Let us suppose these molecules 
capable of memory, both in their capacity as individuals, 
and as societies, and able to transmit their memories to 
their descendants, from the traditions of the dimmest past 
of the experiences of their own lifetime. Some of these 
societies will remain simple, as having had no history, but 
to the greater number unfamiliar, and therefore striking, 
incidents will from time to time occur, which, when they 
do not disturb memory so greatly as to kill, will leave their 
impression upon it. The body or society will remember 
these incidents, and be modified by them in its conduct, 
and therefore more or less in its internal arrangements, 
which will tend inevitably to specialisation. This memory 
of the most striking events of varied lifetimes I maintain, 
with Professor Hering, to be the differentiating cause, 
which, accumulated in countless generations, has led up 
from the amceba to man. If there had been no such 
memory, the amceba of one generation would have exactly - 
resembled the amceba of the preceding, and a perfect 
cycle would have been established ; the modifying effects 
of an additional memory in each generation have made 
the cycle into a spiral, and into a spiral whose eccentricity, 
in the outset hardly perceptible, is becoming greater and 
greater with increasing longevity and more complex social 
and mechanical inventions. 

We say that the chicken grows the horny tip to its beak 
with which it ultimately pecks its way out of its shell, 
because it remembers having grown it before, and the use 
it made of it. We say that it made it on the same prin-— 
ciples as a man makes a spade or a hammer, that is to 
say, as the joint result both of desire and experience. 
When I say experience, [ mean experience not only of 
what will be wanted, but also of the details of all the 


Conclusion 17s 


means that must be taken in order to effect this. Memory, 
therefore, is supposed to guide the chicken not only in 
respect of the main design, but in respect also of every 
atomic action, so to speak, which goes to make up the 
execution of this design. It is not only the suggestion of 
a plan which is due to memory, but, as Professor Hering 
has so well said, it is the binding power of memory which 
alone renders any consolidation or coherence of action 
possible, inasmuch as without this no action could have 
parts subordinate one to another, yet bearing upon a 
common end; no part of an action, great or small, could 
have reference to any other part, much less to a combina- 
tion of all the parts; nothing, in fact, but ultimate atoms 
of actions could ever happen—these bearing the same 
relation to such an action, we will say, as a railway journey 
from London to Edinburgh as a single molecule of hydro- 
gen to a gallon of water. If asked how it is that the 
chicken shows no sign of consciousness concerning this 
design, nor yet of the steps it is taking to carry it out, we 
reply that such unconsciousness is usual in all cases where 
an action, and the design which prompts it, have been re- 
peated exceedingly often. If, again, we are asked how we 
account for the regularity with which each step is taken 
in its due order, we answer that this too is characteristic 
of actions that are done habitually—they being very rarely 
misplaced in respect of any part. 

When I wrote ‘“‘ Life and Habit,” I had arrived at the 
conclusion that memory was the most essential character- — 
istic of life, and went so far as to say, “ Life is that pro- 
perty of matter whereby it can remember—matter which 
can remember is living.”’ I should perhaps have written 
“Life is the being possessed of a memory—the life of a 
thing at any moment is the memories which at that 
moment it retains”’; and I would modify the words that 
immediately follow, namely, “‘ Matter which cannot re- 
member is dead’’; for they imply that there is such a 
thing as matter which cannot remember anything at all, 


176 Unconscious Memory 


and this on fuller consideration I do not believe to be the 
case; I can conceive of no matter which is not able to 
remember a little, and which is not living in respect of 
what it can remember. I do not see how action of any 
kind is conceivable without the supposition that every 
atom retains a memory of certain antecedents. I cannot, 
however, at this point, enter upon the reasons which have 
compelled me to this conclusion. Whether these would 
be deemed sufficient or no, at any rate we cannot believe 
that a system of self-reproducing associations should de- 
velop from the simplicity of the amceba to the complexity 
of the human body without the presence of that memory 
which can alone account at once for the resemblances and 
the differences between successive generations, for the 
arising and the accumulation of divergences—for the 
tendency to differ and the tendency not to differ. 

At parting, therefore, I would recommend the reader 
to see every atom in the universe as living and able to 
feel and to remember, but in a humble way. He must 
have life eternal, as well as matter eternal; and the life 
and the matter must be joined together inseparably as 
body and soul to one another. Thus he will see God every- 
where, not as those who repeat phrases conventionally, 
but as people who would have their words taken according | 
to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he 
will feel that the main difference between him and many 
of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereas both 
he and they use the same language, his opponents only 
half mean what they say, while he means it entirely. 

The attempt to get a higher form of life from a lower 
one is in accordance with our observation and experience. 
It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get 
it from that which has absolutely no life is like trying to 
get something out of nothing. The millionth part of a 
farthing put out to interest at ten per cent. will in five 
hundred years become over a million pounds, and so long 
as we have any millionth of a millionth of the farthing to 


Conclusion i797 


start with, our getting as many million pounds as we have 
a fancy for is only a question of time, but without the 
initial millionth of a millionth of a millionth part, we shall 
get no increment whatever. A little leaven will leaven the 
whole lump, but there must be some leaven. 

I will here quote two passages from an article already 
quoted from on page 55 of this book. They run :— 


We are growing conscious that our earnest and most 
determined efforts to make motion produce sensation and 
volition have proved a failure, and now we want to rest a 
little in the opposite, much less laborious conjecture, and allow 
any kind of motion to start into existence, or at least to 
receive its specific direction from psychical sources ; sensation 
and volition being for the purpose quietly insinuated into 
the constitution of the ultimately moving particles. 


And :— 


In this light it can remain no longer surprising that we 
actually find motility and sensibility so intimately inter- 
blended in nature. ? 


We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as 
living, in respect of the qualities it has in common with 
the organic, rather than the organic as non-living in re- 
spect of the qualities it has in common with the inorganic. 
True, it would be hard to place one’s self on the same 
moral platform as a stone, but this is not necessary ; it is 
enough that we should feel the stone to have a moral 
platform of its own, though that platform embraces little 
more than a profound respect for the laws of gravitation, 
chemical affinity, &c. As for the difficulty of conceiving 
a body as living that has not got a reproductive system— 
we should remember that neuter insects are living but are 
believed to have no reproductive system. Again, we 
should bear in mind that mere assimilation involves all 


1“°The Unity of the Organic Individual,’ by Edward Mont- 
gomery. Muzind, October 1880, p. 477. 
* Tbid., p. 483. 


N 


178 Unconscious Memory 


the essentials of reproduction, and that both air and water 
possess this power in a very high degree. The essence of 
a reproductive system, then, is found low down in the 
scheme of nature. 

At present our leading men of science are in this diffi- 
culty; on the one hand their experiments and their 
theories alike teach them that spontaneous generation 
ought not to be accepted; on the other, they must have 
an origin for the life of the living forms, which, by their 
own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present 
get this origin in no other way than by the Deus ex machina 
method, which they reject as unproved, or a spontaneous 
generation of living from non-living matter, which is no 
less foreign to their experience. As a general rule, they 
prefer the latter alternative. So Professor Tyndall, in his 
celebrated article (Nineteenth Century, November 1878), 
Wrote g—-= 

“It is generally conceded (and seems to be a necessary 
inference from the lessons of science) that spontaneous 
generation must at onetime have taken place’ (italics mine). 

No inference can well be more unnecessary or un- 
scientific. I suppose spontaneous generation ceases to be 
objectionable if it was “‘ only a very little one,’ and came 
off a long time ago in a foreign country. The proper in- 
ference is, that there is a low kind of livingness in every 
atom of matter. Life eternal is as inevitable a conclusion 
as matter eternal. 

It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibra- 
tion or motion there is life and memory, and that there 
is vibration and motion at all times in all things. 

The reader who takes the above position will find that 
he can explain the entry of what he calls death among ~ 
what he calls the living, whereas he could by no means 
introduce life into his system if he started without it. 
Death is deducible; life is not deducible. Death is a 
change of memories; it is not the destruction of all me- 
mory. It is as the liquidation of one company, each 


Conclusion 179 


member of which will presently join a new one, and retain 
a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of 
_ greater aptitude for working in concert with other mole- 
cules. This is why animals feed on grass and on each 
other, and cannot proselytise or convert the rude ground 
before it has been tutored in the first principles of the 
higher kinds of association. 

Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of 
believing anything in this book unless he either likes it, 
or feels angry at being told it. If required belief in this 
or that makes a man angry, I suppose he should, as a 
general rule, swallow it whole then and there upon the 
spot, otherwise he may take it or leave it as he likes. [ 
have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them ; 
all on which I rest are as open to the reader as to me. 
If I have sometimes used hard terms, the probability is 
that I have not understood them, but have done so by a 
slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company 
he has been lately keeping. They should be skipped. 

Do not let him be too much cast down by the bad 
language with which professional scientists obscure the 
issue, nor by their seeming to make it their business to 
fog us under the pretext of removing our difficulties. It 
is not the ratcatcher’s interest to catch all the rats; and, 
as Handel observed so sensibly, “Every professional 
gentleman must do his best for to live.’ The art of some 
of our philosophers, however, is sufficiently transparent, 
and consists too often in saying “‘ organism which... 
must be classified among fishes,”’! instead of “ fish,” and 
then proclaiming that they have “an ineradicable ten- 
dency to try to make things clear.””? 

If another example is required, here is the following 
from an article than which I have seen few with which I 
more completely agree, or which have given me greater 


1 Professor Huxley, ‘‘ Encycl. Brit.,”’ 9th ed., art. * Evolution,”’ 


Pp. 750. 
2 “* Hume,” by Professor Huxley, p. 45. 


180 Unconscious Memory 


pleasure. If our men of science would take to writing in 
this way, we should be glad enough to follow them. The 
passage I refer to runs thus :— 


Professor Huxley speaks of a ‘‘ verbal fog by which the 
question at issue may be hidden”; is there no verbal fog 
in the statement that the etiology of crayfishes resolves itself 
into a gradual evolution in the course of the mesosoic and sub- 
sequent epochs of the world’s history of these animals from a 
primitive astacomorphous form? Would it be fog or light 
that would envelope the history of man if we said that the 
existence of man was explained by the hypothesis of his 
gradual evolution from a primitive anthropomorphous form ? 
I should call this fog, not light. 


Especially let him mistrust those who are holding forth 
about protoplasm, and maintaining that this is the only 
living substance. Protoplasm may be, and perhaps is, 
the most living part of an organism, as the most capable of 
retaining vibrations, but this is the utmost that can be 
claimed for it. 

Having mentioned protoplasm, I may ask the reader to 
note the breakdown of that school of philosophy which 
divided the ego from the non ego. The protoplasmists, on 
the one hand, are whittling away at the ego, till they have 
reduced it to a little jelly in certain parts of the body, and 
they will whittle away this too presently, if they go on as 
they are doing now. 

Others, again, are so unifying the ego and the non ego, 
that with them there will soon be as little of the non ego 
left as there is of the ego with their opponents. Both, how- 
ever, are so far agreed as that we know not where to draw 
the line between the two, and this renders nugatory any 
system which is founded upon a distinction between them. 

The truth is, that all classification whatever, when we 
examine its raison d’étre closely, is found to be arbitrary— 
to depend on our sense of our own convenience, and not 


1“ The Philosophy of Crayfishes,’’ by the Right Rev. the Lord 
Bishop of Carlisle. Nineteenth Century for October 1880, p. 636. 


Conclusion 181 


on any inherent distinction in the nature of the things 
themselves. Strictly speaking, there is only one thing 
and one action. The universe, or God, and the action of 
the universe as a whole. 

Lastly, I may predict with some certainty that before 
long we shall find the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin (with an infusion of Professor Hering into the 
bargain) generally accepted instead of the neo-Darwinism 
of to-day, and that the variations whose accumulation 
results in species will be recognised as due to the wants 
and endeavours of the living forms in which they appear, 
instead of being ascribed to chance, or, in other words, 
to unknown causes, as by Mr. Charles Darwin’s system. 
We shall have some idyllic young naturalist bringing up 
Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s note on Tvapa natans,1 and La- 
marck’s kindred passage on the descent of Ranunculus 
hederaceus from Ranunculus aquatilis® as fresh discoveries, 
and be told, with much happy simplicity, that those 
animals and plants which have felt the need of such or 
such a structure have developed it, while those which 
have not wanted it have gone without it. Thus, it will 
be declared, every leaf we see around us, every structure 
of the minutest insect, will bear witness to the truth of 
the “ great guess’”’ of the greatest of naturalists concern- 
ing the memory of living matter. 

I dare say the public will not object to this, and am 
very sure that none of the admirers of Mr. Charles Darwin 
or Mr. Wallace will protest against it; but it may be as 
well to point out that this was not the view of the matter 
taken by Mr. Wallace in 1858 when he and Mr. Darwin 
first came forward as preachers of natural selection. At 
that time Mr. Wallace saw clearly enough the difference 
between the theory of “natural selection”’ and that of 
Lamarck. He wrote :— 

1 “Tes Amours des Plantes,” p. 360. Paris, 1800. 

2 “Philosophie Zoologique,’’ tom. i, p. 231. Ed. M. Martin. 
Paris, 1873. 


N 2 


182 Unconscious Memory 


The hypothesis of Lamarck—that progressive changes 
in species have been produced by the attempts of animals 
to increase the development of their own organs, and thus 
modify their structure and habits—has been repeatedly 
and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties 
and species, . . . but the view here developed renders such 
an hypothesis quite unnecessary. ...The powerful re- 
tractile talons of the falcon and the cat tribes have not been 
produced or increased by the volition of those animals, 

. neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring 
to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly 
stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties 
which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than 
usual at once secured a fresh vange of pasture over the same 
ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first 
scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them (italics in 
Original), 


This is absolutely the neo-Darwinian doctrine, and a 
denial of the mainly fortuitous character of the variations 
in animal and vegetable forms cuts at its root. That Mr. 
Wallace, after years of reflection, still adhered to this 
view, is proved by his heading a reprint of the paragraph 
just quoted from? with the words “ Lamarck’s hypo- 
thesis very different frora that now advanced ” ; nor do 
any of his more recent works show that he has modified 
his opinion. It should be noted that Mr. Wallace does 
not call his work “‘ Contributions to the Theory of Evolu- 
tion,’’ but to that of ‘‘ Natural Selection.” 

Mr. Darwin, with characteristic caution, only commits 
himself to saying that Mr. Wallace has arrived at almost 
_ (italics mine) the same general conclusions as he, Mr. 

Darwin, has done ;? but he still, as in 1859, declares that 
it would be “‘a serious error to suppose that the greater 
number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one 


1 “ Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society.”’ Williams 
& Norgate, 1858, p. 61. 

*“ Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,” 2d ed= 
LS7 0 OVALS 

*“ Origin of Species,” p. 1, ed. 1872. 


Conclusion 183 


generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to suc- 
ceeding generations,’’! and he still comprehensively con- 
demns the “ well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as 
advanced by Lamarck.’ 

As for the statement in the passage quoted from Mr. 
Wallace, to the effect that Lamarck’s hypothesis “has 
been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the 
subject of varieties and species,” it is a very surprising 
one. I have searched Evolution literature in vain for 
any refutation of the Erasmus Darwinian system (for this 
is what Lamarck’s hypothesis really is) which need make 
the defenders of that system at all uneasy. The best 
attempt at an answer to Erasmus Darwin that has yet 
been made is “ Paley’s Natural Theology,” which was 
throughout obviously written to meet Buffon and the 
“ Zoonomia.” It is the manner of theologians to say that 
such an such an objection ‘“‘ has been refuted over and 
over again,’ without at the same time telling us when 
and where; it is to be regretted that Mr. Wallace has 
here taken a leaf out of the theologians’ book. His state- 
ment is one which will not pass muster with those whom 
public opinion is sure in the end to follow. 

Did Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, “‘ repeatedly and 
easily refute ’” Lamarck’s hypothesis in his brilliant article 
in the Leader, March 20, 1852? On the contrary, that 
article is expressly directed against those “‘ who cavalierly 
reject the hypothesis of Lamarck and his followers.” 
This article was written six years before the words last 
quoted from Mr. Wallace ; how absolutely, however, does 
the word “ cavalierly ” apply to them ! 

Does Isidore Geoffroy, again, bear Mr. Wallace’s asser- 
tion out better? In 1859—that is to say, but a short 


1“ Origin of Species,” 6th ed.,p. 206. I ought in fairness to Mr. 
Darwin to say that he does not hold the error to be quite so serious as 
he once did. Itis now ‘‘a serious error”’ only ; in 1859 it was “‘ the 
most serious error.’’—‘“‘ Origin of Species,’”’ 1st ed., p. 209. 

* © Origin of Species,” 1st ed., p. 242; 6th ed., p. 233. 


184 Unconscious Memory 


time after Mr. Wallace had written—he wrote as 
follows :— 


Such was the language which Lamarck heard during 
his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of 
years and blindness ; this was what people did not hesitate 
to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed 
they are still saying—commonly too without any know- 
ledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at 
secondhand bad caricatures of his teaching. 

When will the time come when we may see Lamarck’s 
theory discussed—and, I may as well at once say, refuted 
in some important points'—with at any rate the respect due 
to one of the most illustrious masters of our science ? And 
when will this theory, the hardihood of which has been 
greatly exaggerated, become freed from the interpretations 
and commentaries by the false light of which so many natu- 
ralists have formed their opinion concerning it ? If its author 
is to be condemned, let it be, at any rate, not before he has 
been heard.? 


In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck’s 
‘‘ Philosophie Zoologique.” He was still able to say, with, 
I believe, perfect truth, that Lamarck’s theory has “ never 
yet had the honour of being discussed seriously.’’3 

Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less 
cavalier than Mr. Wallace. He writes :—#4 


Lamarck introduced the conception of the action of an | 
animal on itself as a factor in producing modification. 


[Lamarck did nothing of the kind. It was Buffon and 
Dr. Darwin who introduced this, but more especially Dr. 
Darwin. | 


But a litile consideration showed (italics mine) that though 
Lamarck had seized what, as far as it goes, is a true cause 
of modification, it is a cause the actual effects of which 
are wholly inadequate to account for any considerable modifi- 
cation in animals, and which can have no influence what- 
ever in the vegetable world, &c. 


11 never could find what these particular points were. 

* Isidore Geoffroy, “ Hist. Nat. Gen.,” tom. ii. p. 407, 1859. 

*M. Martin’s edition of the “‘ Philosophie Zoologique”’ (Paris, 
1873), Introduction, p. vi. 

4“ Encyclopedia Britannica,” 9th ed., p. 750. 


Conclusion 185 


I should be very glad to come across some of the “ little 
consideration ’’ which will show this. I have searched for 
it far and wide, and have never been able to find it. 

I think Professor Huxley has been exercising some of 
his ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear in 
the article on Evolution, already so often quoted from. 
We find him (p. 750) pooh-poohing Lamarck, yet on the 
next page he says, “‘ How far ‘ natural selection ’ suffices 
for the production of species remains to be seen.” And 
this when “ natural selection’ was already so nearly of 
age! Why, to those who know how to read between a 
philosopher’s lines, the sentence comes to very nearly the 
same as a declaration that the writer has no great opinion 
of “natural selection.” Professor Huxley continues, 
“Few can doubt that, if not the whole cause, it is a very 
important factor in that. operation.’”’ A philosopher’s 
words should be weighed carefully, and when Professor 
Huxley says “‘ few can doubt,” we must remember that 
he may be including himself among the few whom he 
considers to have the power of doubting on this matter. 
He does not say “ few will,’ but “few can” doubt, as 
though it were only the enlightened who would have the 
power of doing so. Certainly “‘ nature,’’—for this is what 
“natural selection’’ comes to,—is rather an important 
factor in the operation, but we do not gain much by being 
told so. If, however, Professor Huxley neither believes 
in the origin of species, through sense of need on the part 
of animals themselves, nor yet in “ natural selection,’ we 
should be glad to know what he does believe in. 

The battle is one of greater importance than appears at 
first sight. It is a battle between teleology and non- 
teleology, between the purposiveness and the non-purpo- 
siveness of the organs in animal and vegetable bodies. 
According’ to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, 
organs are purposive; according to Mr. Darwin and his 
followers, they are not purposive. But the main argu- 
ments against the system of Dr. Erasmus Darwin are 


186 Unconscious Memory 


arguments which, so far as they have any weight, tell 
against evolution generally. Now that these have been 
disposed of, and the prejudice against evolution has been 
overcome, it will be seen that there is nothing to be said — 
against the system of Dr. Darwin and Lamarck which does 
not tell with far greater force against that of Mr. Charles 
Darwin and Mr. Wallace. 


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Luck, or Cunning 


As the main means of organic modification? An attempt to 
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‘‘In Life and Hadit I contended that heredity was a mode of memory... that 
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was to show how Professor Hering of Prague had treated the connection between 
memory and heredity. .. . In the course of writing [Luck, or Cunning] 1 became more 
and more convinced that no progress could be made towards a sounder view of the 
theory of descent until. . . the mindless theory of Charles Darwinian natural selection 
was finally discredited, and a mindful theory of evolution was substituted in its place 
. -. Stripped of detail the point at issue is this: whether luck, or cunning is the fitter 
to be insisted on as the main means of organic development.” 

Samuel Butler, in Luck, or Cunning ? 


Unconscious Memory 
By Samuel Butler | 


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“The main object of Unconscious Memory was to show how Professor Hering ot 
Prague had treated the connection between memory and heredity ; to show again how 
ubstantial was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself in spite of some 
little superficial resemblance; to put forward a suggestion as regards the physics of 
memory, and to meet the most plausible objection which I have yet seen brought 
against Life and Hadit.... The question which Professor Hering and I have tried to 
answer is, ‘ How comes it that anything can be inherited at all? In virtue of what 
power is it that offspring can repeat and improve upon the performances of their 
parents?’ Our answer was, ‘ Because in a very valid sense there is continued personality 
and an abiding memory between successive generations.’” 

Samuel Butler, in Luck, or Cunning ? 


London: A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C. 4 





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